Comparación de resultados con otros estudios

restitution stories attempt to outdistance mortality by rendering illness transitory. Chaos stories are sucked into the undertow of illness and the disasters that attend to it. Quest stories meet suffering head on; they accept illness and seek to use it…what is quested for may never be wholly clear, but the quest is defined by the ill person’s belief that something is to be gained through the experience (p.115)

This is the only narrative which Frank (1995) described in which the “teller has a story to tell – it speaks from the ill person’s perspective and holds chaos at bay” (p. 115).

After surviving the anti-narrative of chaos, Amanda was the only participant who displayed hints of the quest narrative. This is surprising, given that Frank (1995) believed that the communicative body is told in quest stories. In fact, Amanda was the only participant out of the four women in this study to show no strong affiliation to the communicative body. Thus, in this study, the communicative body is telling a story other than quest. Nevertheless, Frank (1995) commented that those telling a quest narrative often used metaphors of a ‘journey’ within their stories. Indeed, Amanda used similar metaphors:

It’s like taking a wrong turning on a road, and if you could just backtrack and go down that road, it’s just a few seconds away. And that was an overwhelming feeling…that I could see normal, I could see my life there, and I could see the parachute opening normally and this is what’s happened, and it’s just a few seconds away. And then it’s a few days away and a few weeks away and a few years away. The point where it went wrong is a very specific thing for me, and that’s the point where my life took a different turning.

Unlike the other narratives described by Frank (1995), the range of quest stories is so broad that further specification is useful; therefore, quest stories have at least three facets: memoir, manifesto, and automythology. However, Amanda does not display all three of the facets required in a quest story.

The first facet of quest, memoir, combines telling the illness story with telling other events in the writer’s life; this can also be described as an interrupted

autobiography (Frank, 1995). In this facet of quest, trials are not minimised, but are told stoically, with no special insight claimed at the end. Amanda often displayed this first facet of quest:

I thought that the fact that I was medically trained before my accident has had a big affect on how I’ve reacted to it. I’ve always been very active, I danced from when I was six years old. I did ballet, came home, hung my ballet shoes on the back of my bedroom door and got on the plane [to the USA]. I didn’t actually come back into the bedroom until several months later when I was carried back in, and one of the first things I saw was my ballet shoes on the back of the door…being paralysed was the easy bit, it was coping with everything else!

The second facet of quest is the manifesto. According to Frank (1995) the truth that has been learned in these stories is prophetic, often carrying demands for social action. Amanda clearly presented this aspect of quest:

[TV station] made a documentary about the pregnancy, and I went along with it because I felt it was important to document it…If they were going to do this, I wasn’t going to go without a fight, and I was going to scream it from the rooftops. The country pay social services to act on our best behalf, and I was going to tell the country what they were doing.

Amanda’s call for social action continues further in her fundraising efforts for spinal research and other charities, and also in her business, where she’d “like to train really good carers and send them to other people”. Another aspect of this manifesto facet of quest is that those who tell manifesto stories do not want to go back to a former state of health, which is often viewed as naïve illusion. Amanda does not fully fit with this aspect, as earlier comments show:

I look at people that are couch potatoes and don’t do any sort of sport and abuse their bodies, and I think “if I just had a body that worked, I just wouldn’t do that”. You don’t realise what you’ve got, but you never do until you’ve lost it…

Nevertheless, she does not actively strive for her former state of health, or search for a ‘cure’ for her SCI.

The final aspect of quest is the automythology. This is represented in the metaphor of the Phoenix, that reinvents itself from the ashes of its own body (Frank, 1995). Automythology fashions the author as one who not only has survived, but has been reborn; it reaches out, but its language is more personal than political (Frank, 1995). This, however, is the facet of quest that Amanda

exhibits little of. Although there are obvious changes in her life since the injury, she claims to feel no different within herself:

I think my life if I hadn’t been injured would have been very different, but I don’t think I’ve changed…I’ve gained a lot of confidence as I’ve got older…it’s probably not anything to do with the fact that I’m injured, it’s just you gain confidence as you get older.

In the end, out of the four participants, only Amanda showed any strong affinity for any of Frank’s (1995) narrative types, and even she did not match the descriptions of the narrative types as clearly as those in the study on men and SCI by Smith and Sparkes (2004, 2005). Accordingly, what kind of story are the other women telling? What kinds of narrative do they drawn on from the cultural repertoire available to them?