SURROUNDED BY TEXT: An exploration of a life narrative through pain and cancer | Richard Hovey

Abstract

This manuscript explores hermeneutics as a dynamic research approach in health sciences, emphasizing its role in interpreting reflections and narratives to gain insight into complex human experiences. In it, I highlight the importance of philosophical hermeneutics in understanding life texts, including literature and artwork, is highlighted, challenging the notion that philosophy is detached from concrete, tangible experiences. The manuscript introduces philosophical hermeneutics, emphasizing ongoing self-reflection in the interpretive process. Through rigorous hermeneutical self-reflection, I probe intersections among self, health, and social life, contending that interpretation goes beyond prescribed ways of thinking, encouraging creativity and unfamiliar perspectives to expand understanding. I introduce the idea of interpreting art as text, emphasizing that works of art make statements to the truth, contributing to a comprehensive hermeneutical consciousness. I integrate Kearney's perspective on narrative as a form of identity, highlighting the role of reflection and interpretation in expressing and connecting experiences through various forms of text. I discuss how art, in various forms, is a source of knowledge and a catalyst for self-reflection. Finally, I offer various examples of text interpretation as I share personal photographs and reflections, inviting readers to engage in their own interpretative processes. Throughout, I advocate for hermeneutics as an approach to self-understanding and the renewal of thought and perception.

Keywords: text, hermeneutics, aesthetics, cancer, chronic pain, & experience

 Hermeneutics for Reflection and Interpretation of Texts

Hermeneutics as a research approach is, at its core, an interpretation of a reflection. It entails carefully listening and reading the narratives of our research participants, patients, or the papers they help foster to extend our insight and understanding of their unique perspectives. These narrative-stories are then available to be interpreted by the researcher into findings that may enhance our understanding of complex human experiences. Through a hermeneutical interpretive approach, research Findings (Hovey et al., 2022) may include literature as text from sources outside academia to help in creating an understanding that has depth and enhances the accessibility for the reader. In the following sections of this paper, I endeavor to offer the reader an opportunity to learn from the other and self, whether as the same topic or new, but from different perspectives. This work is meant to be considered for educational and conversational use as an introduction for those who may not be aware of hermeneutic concepts and understandings. It is not meant to be a static take-as-is method, but an approach that provokes discussion, transformation of thinking, and self-reflection. It is also meant to be accessible to readers of varied backgrounds as an invitation to delve deeper into this philosophy as an accessible approach to the interpretation of life text.  Hermeneutics become a means to reflect profoundly on our experiences, investigate them, write about them, and share them so they may be re-interpreted through others’ perspectives, bringing about new insights into their meaning and the meaning-making process.

Philosophy is sometimes misunderstood as something that cannot be considered concrete or tangible in thought and practice. However, applied philosophical hermeneutics takes place as a rigorous interpretive approach to explore complex human experiences. It is interested in the reflective part of human understanding rather than in experts agreeing upon a single explanation. In this context, both an explanation (quantitive) and the interpretation (qualitative) are appeased through their own unique research utility and purpose.

“Philosophical hermeneutics is not a traditional theory of interpretation. It does not seek to establish a generally acceptable method for the reading of obscure and difficult texts. Philosophical Hermeneutics, much rather, an interpretation of interpretation, a prolonged meditation upon what ‘happens’ to us within a ‘hermeneutic experience’ when we are challenged by texts and artworks, ancient and modern.” (Davey, 2006, p.1)

Davey’s brief but poignant introduction to philosophical hermeneutics points us to the importance of ongoing self-reflection in the interpretive process of this approach. When something happens to us, when we have an experience, we interpret that experience through reflection which becomes our ever-evolving perspective. New experiences are then interwoven with all the others, expanding our horizon of understanding (Hovey et. al., 2022). As such, throughout this paper, I engage in rigorous hermeneutical self-reflection in order to identify and probe the intersections among myself, health, and social life.

In this same quote, Davey also hints at the fundamental sameness between texts and artwork in terms of their capacity to move us to reflect on what happens to us as we attempt to make sense and meaning of them within our own lives. Knowledge is not exclusive to academic journals and philosophical texts but can be found in and constructed through artwork such as poetry, theatre, paintings, dance, etc. Experiencing this artwork invites, even perhaps demands, self-reflection, bringing about new insights about ourselves and our lifeworld.

In this article, I begin by offering a brief introduction to hermeneutic sensibility, interpretation, aesthetic consciousness, the lifelong search for meaning through personal narratives, and the concept of “text”. Then, I demonstrate the tremendous potential of hermeneutics through reflective and interpretive writing for narrative medicine. Through my interpretations, I present some of my personal ‘meditations’ on photographs I have taken at different times in my life as I engage in making sense of my own life and health. As a professor and researcher in a Faculty of Dental Medicine and Oral Health Sciences, a scholar of Hermeneutics, and someone who lives with cancer and chronic pain, I am uniquely positioned to weave together both theory and practice. I invite readers to build on my reflections and to make meaning of them as they ‘speak’ to them in the circumstances of their own lives.

Hermeneutic Sensibility

The interpretation of text is always provisional. As we become more experienced as human beings and open to other possibilities, we recognize multiple interpretations of the same text. For Gadamer, hermeneutics is a universal mode of inquiry rather than a method or procedure for reading or understanding texts, as it was with early hermeneutic scholars. It is ultimately something far more substantive (Gadamer, 1989). A hermeneutic sensibility (sense-ability) refers to our ability or capacity to sense. It is characterized by openness to sense and meaning, attentive to what is not always said in our expressions yet understood and felt. Philosophical hermeneutics senses the expressions given by the sufferer through all their senses: sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste, and perhaps a sixth sense, as text (Grondin, 2013). All these senses collectively constitute the suffering a person experiences. Suffering becomes pervasive in all aspects of our lives, our sense of life, and its meaning. Therefore, leveraging a hermeneutic sensibility becomes crucial for physicians and health researchers to sense — with sensitivity to the sufferer’s whole life experience (Madison, 2013). Gravitating toward sense and meaning as they emerge out of life itself, hermeneutics must have something to say about the issue of the sense and meaning of trauma and illness.

Gadamer wrote:

“Participation” is a strange word. Its dialectic is not taking parts, but in a way taking the whole. Everybody who participates in something does not take something away, so that the others cannot have it. The opposite is true: by sharing, by our participating in the things in which we are participating, we enrich them; they do not become smaller, but larger. The whole life of tradition consists exactly in this enrichment so that life is our culture and our past: the whole inner store of our lives is always extending by participating.” (Gadamer, 1984, 64)

 Hermeneutics as a philosophy and even in its application—i.e., in human and health sciences research, clinical medical practice or the daily encounters of life as text—from the mundane to the exceptional are all interpretable. By participating in interpretation through hermeneutic sensibility and sharing those reflections with others, we can expand our and others’ understanding of a given topic.

A Surplus of Meaning – Interpretation

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns -- but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth. (Bringhurst, 2013)

Our world invites interpretation through the text that surrounds us and clothes us in the thread of our daily lives. We as human beings have no choice because text appears constantly, whether through an encounter within our own taken-for-granted lives, the storytelling of a research participant’s lived experience, or a form of art that uniquely speaks to us. Interpretation upon the experience of text is a means to gain insight, depth, and expanded understanding as we engage the surplus of meaning of something, someone, or a topic beyond its obvious explanation. Gadamer explains, “…in its proper art form, the novel (text)—has its original existence in being read, (we the reader bring it back into their world) as that the epic has it in being declaimed by the rhapsodist or the picture in being looked at by the spectator.” (1989,160) The reading of a book or a poem, or the viewing of art or performance becomes an event in which the content takes significance through each person’s personal interpretation and reflection through reading and re-reading or viewing and re-viewing. This experience emerges from text because of the ever-present surplus of meaning. Gadamer notes that the possibility of understanding something, maybe anything, is when text can be brought into presentation through reflection and interpretation with conversation, or better–yet, with multiple interpretations and subsequent conversations:

“The truth of experience always contains an orientation towards new experience … the experienced person proves to be … someone who is radically un-dogmatic … the dialectic of experience has its own fulfilment not in definitive knowledge, but in that openness to experience that is encouraged by experience itself.” (Gadamer, 1989, 319)

We then can open our thinking to others and expand our understanding of another person’s experience, written, spoken, as a thing or topic. We then have a new perception of an experience that may range from the ordinary to the extraordinary. This idea applies to the personal experience of moving from health to serious illness.

Hermeneutic interpretation begins with a reflection through the experience of text which projects the reader beyond the limited rationalization or reaffirmation of what they thought the author or artist meant. As such, it surpasses prescribed ways of thinking, fixed and perpetuated understandings, and questions that already have answers telling me how I ought to reflect or construe this text. This is the work of memorization and replication, forms of education that limit our understanding by narrowing comprehension and thwarting original thought. From a hermeneutic perspective, we move away from this habituated understanding of text, instead asking questions that do not already have an answer, especially not one correct answer. Creativity through new and unfamiliar interpretations has the possibility to open our horizons of understanding to include other ways and possibilities of knowing and thinking. Interpretation releases the suspense subsumed within a text and “fulfills the text into a present speech” (Ricoeur, 1998, 162), with a renewed presence. This is what is meant when we have a conversation with a text, where we think beyond what the author was trying to say, in those exact words, into a new perception and understanding of what the author, artist, participant-patient was trying to say and thereby interpretively revealing possible new meanings, where the text begins anew. Our personal textus is now re-written, ‘interwoven’ with all the other text. Through its unique interpretation, we become enabled to bring into light new understandings of something we thought we knew well with the possibility of changing our previous perspectives.

Beyond the author of this paper, I am also a professor, researcher, teacher, writer, person living with chronic pain and cancer, and patient advocate. I have furthered my current understanding of myself and others through interpretive and reflective writing, photography, painting, sculpting, attending to the vitality of action or stagnation of inaction. Hermeneutics by means of reflective writing reveals the ever-present uncertainty of life, which may intercept the movement of text, surpassing our habituated, encultured, taken-for-granted positions toward new understandings and ways of knowing. 

Aesthetic Consciousness
Our aesthetic consciousness supposes that there exists a purely aesthetic way of viewing the world, or alternatively, that there is a specific kind of experience to which we may apply the term ‘aesthetic’. For example, when we say that a piece of music does nothing more than to stir up emotions of well-being or sadness, such a belief reduces the piece into an aspect of aesthetic consciousness (Gadamer, 1989, 85-87).  Gadamer (1989) explains that if we listen to music as a purely aesthetic endeavour devoid of cognitive substance, meaning or interpretation, it is reduced to only engaging a few of our senses and sentimentality. Gadamer argues that works of art are more than just a means to achieve emotional responses; works of art make a statement to a truth and consequently are not just sensations or opportunities to experience feelings and emotions:

“Every work of art, not only literature, must be understood like any other text that requires understanding, and this kind of understanding has to be acquired. This gives hermeneutical consciousness a comprehensiveness that surpasses even the aesthetic consciousness. Understanding must be conceived as a part of the event in which meaning occurs, the event in which the meaning of all statements, those of art and all others of tradition – is formed and actualised.” (Gadamer, 1989, 165)

Like text, works of art have something to say to us and can evoke and provoke vibrant conversation, provided we begin conversation through the interpretation of art into text. Art is an expression of someone’s truth with meaning to be brought back into the world as text, a text that speaks to us.

Aesthetic differentiation is a term that refers to the idea that a work of art can be understood as being separate from the circumstances of its original context (Gadamer, 1989, 85-87). In other words, art as text can and should become contextually interpretable throughout history, other than only from the perspective of the historical context from which it was initially conceived, purposed, and produced. All art is historically located, but it can be brought into the present without losing its truth so long as we do not keep it historically incarcerated. Liberated art is free to become a form of text that can be interpreted into other narratives or stories that help us understand experiences and events in our lives with others and to know ourselves differently or more authentically with their interpretive help.

Every life is a search for a meaningful narrative

Kearney wrote:

We all seek, willy-nilly, to introduce some kind of concord into the everyday discord and dispersal we find about us. We may, therefore, agree with the poet who described narrative as a stay against confusion.  For the story telling impulse is, and always has been, a desire for a certain ‘unity of life’. In our own post-modern era of fragmentation and fracture, I shall be arguing that narrative provides us with one of our most viable forms of identity – individual and communal. (Kearney, 2002, p.4)

As we seek ways to express the indescribable by words alone about something as strange and pervasive as cancer, we may need to reach out to other forms of text to help connect ourselves to an experience, perhaps a picture, a poem, literature, a painting, a statue, a movie or through some metaphor. This is where reflection and interpretation become essential and help us communicate our experiences as texts to others, provided the Other is open to (an)-otherness. We can point at a piece of art and say, “That is exactly how it feels,” that art work speaks to me like nothing else could about my cancer and pain or construct a metaphor to help others understand without having had the same experience. Now, we have co-created an opening, perhaps a liminal, hermeneutic, ethical, or transformational opening. The locus of hermeneutics, ethics, and transformation all exist within the in-between. This liminal space or threshold is an invitation to learn from each other where new understandings may emerge like a phoenix rising from its ashes.

Researching Text

Text in many different forms surrounds us as an essential aspect of our everyday life. They span a numerous encounter of our personal and professional lives, as a patient and researcher understanding other people’s pain and cancer experiences, I try to help them by introducing different kinds of text to explore how they, and myself are feeling and understanding their unique experience. 

Reflexively and interpretively, text helps navigate and make sense of the world, and hermeneutics, the art of understanding, calls us to reflect on these experiences. As a researcher, I commonly rely on the spoken narrative-stories offered by research participants as they endeavour to articulate their sometimes life-altering experiences, such as living pain or cancer.  To be clear, although I use photographs, this manuscript is not about photography but about the image captured within, more specifically a hermeneutical exploration of text brought on by these photographs. For example, I could not bring home a statue from the street, museum or gallery of something that provoked a profound personal reflection and interpretation, but a photograph and interpretation of that statue can provide insight for others to share in that experience. In the context of hermeneutics, the purpose of text is to learn reflectively about our life. As a hermeneutic researcher in health sciences, I learn from the participant-patient as a person who experiences something that has not been experienced by myself or others. The participant-patient holds knowledge that I and others in my field can only access through engaged conversation. In the simplest terms, as an applied philosophical hermeneutical researcher, I research text. Text, in this perspective, is a representation in words and images of phenomena, ideas, actions, experiences, incidents, suffering, and joy.

Gadamer offers insight into text as more than a verbal manifestation of thoughts, a verbal narrative:

“What is stated is not everything. The unsaid is what first makes what is stated into a word that can reach us” (Gadamer, 1973/1993, 504).

 Text surrounds us all the time, where everything becomes interpretable, from the unsaid action or non-action, eye contact, tears, laughter, to even a subtle shrugging of the shoulders. The author offers his personal interpretations of several events they encountered during life encounters with text. Text and its context situate what speaks to us and what does not, in the moment.

I wish to remind readers that the texts provided throughout this manuscript offer examples from photographs which moves me to reflection, and interpretive examples from research. The photographs I will reflect on and interpret in the section below are ones I have taken myself during different trips in the last decade. I have selected those photographs that I felt were evocative of emotions I have experienced about my cancer and chronic pain diagnoses.

Since we as humans are always in the process of interpreting through our senses, the examples provided are only to offer a provisional initial hermeneutics sensibility, a capacity to sense that which surrounds us daily (sense)-(ability). All interpretations, including those in this manuscript, are provisional until new or more narrative parts become available to add to understanding the whole of an experience. I took and chose these photographs to represent some of my experiences as a researcher. Furthermore, these images serve to invite further conversation, such that readers may take on the task of creating their own interpretations of the photographs and of my ow interpretations. Through conversation, we reveal a connection to the constitution of the text, an original capacity for renewal of thought and perception. The interpretation of a text “culminates in the self-interpretation of a subject who henceforth understands her/himself better, understands self as different” (Ricoeur, 1998,160), or simply begins to understand oneself. As such, hermeneutics and reflective philosophy provide a self-understanding through the many textures within our lives:

"It is only when the attempt to accept what is said as true fails that we try to "understand" the text as another's opinion" (Gadamer 1989, 294).

 For example, I took the photo below as a means to express how living with chronic pain changed my way of living. What was of interest to me as the interpreter in this scene was deciphered through a personal lens of pain as suffering, representing chaos, a pained life, fragmented and torn apart.

In this photograph (photo A), chairs that were once placed in neat rows on a stage, are in disarray. I place myself on that metaphoric life stage, one I have been performing upon for decades, now interrupted with no foreseeable way back to my previous life. The process of making sense of this text opened the possibility to set up a fresh foundation, a new way of making sense of my circumstances, a new stage from which to perform my life activities. This new stage will be very different because my living with cancer and chronic pain have become interwoven within my current and future life as the new text. I will never be the same as before these health conditions arose. It makes me feel sad, anxious, and angry all at the same time.

Walking Through and with the Weight of Pain

The next photograph is one I took of a statue of a man presumably wearing work clothes and holding a briefcase, with the top half of his body encased in stone (photo B). While there are undoubtedly many possible interpretations of this sculpture, I saw it as a representation of walking with and through stone, working with and through the weighty challenges of my own chronic pain and cancer. Its meaning in this context, for me, was about learning to live with chronic pain as a result of a cycling accident, arthritis, and cancer treatments.  Completing another ten sessions of chemotherapy feels like walking through stone. It can feel at times like being stuck in a liminal space, in-between the weight of health challenges on my shoulders, slowly dragging me down and shrouding my previous motivations, hopes, and dreams. This statue resonates strongly with me as a metaphor for finding the resilience and perseverance to learn how to live well with chronic pain and an omnipresent incurable health condition. However, with a diagnosis of cancer, the stone feels thicker, heavier, and riddled with the unknown. In the context of my life experiences, a few years ago, before pain and cancer, I might have walked by this statue interested but without any deep personal connection. This statue as text now has been brought to the forefront of an enhanced understanding of myself and lived experience of life with cancer and chronic pain.   

When someone asks me how I am feeling, the image above offers the visual text to invite meaningful conversation about my specific conditions, which others may not have experienced before and therefore currently are unable to understand the complexity. However, we have all walked through stone at some point in our lives. Events happen that force us to work through the weight of that burden and arrive somewhat transformed on the other side. These experiences and previous understandings of working through blocks of stone provide us with an approach of meeting new and more challenging life events. When I offer others this photograph along with my interpretation of it, I also provide them with a pathway to understand my lived experience. We can then learn from each other as suffering can lead to wisdom, a gift of experience which goes beyond self-pity toward self-empathy. Self-empathy is where healing of the soul can take place when a medical cure is not a current possibility.

Different directions relational breakdowns created by chronic health conditions

I interpret the text as a photograph (photo C) above, in the form of a black and white photograph of two bicycles facing opposite directions and leaning against a brick wall, as the vulnerability of my relationship with my partner as someone living with chronic pain and cancer. The wall behind the bicycles represents the impenetrable reality of the diagnosis and life-altering reality of a life that is changed, perhaps forever. My relationship cannot move forward as anticipated before chronic pain and cancer; it has metaphorically hit a wall. The bicycles now face different directions as the possibility of relationships becoming vulnerable as I experience chronic pain and cancer while my partner works to support me. Both roles are exhausting and can push us to a breaking point of frustration, anger, and loss of our sense of self and of the other. We are no longer the people we knew before pain and cancer. Care for this relationship and others now need attention of their own to keep us with the potential of moving in different directions of separation created by pain and suffering.

Feeling unprotected, vulnerable, and personal collapse

The next photograph I took is of a battered and broken umbrella, turned inside-out, and abandoned in the middle of a street.

Umbrellas are used for protection from the elements (photo D). The word itself also serves as a metaphor for a generalization of things, topics, and events as an “umbrella term”, a term used to cover a broad category of things rather than a single specific item. This generalization as interpretable text can then be transferred to our health, where a myriad of conditions can fall under this umbrella. When in good health, the umbrella can mean that we are feeling protected from the horrific weather realized metaphorically by illness. This photograph exemplifies how it feels for me to live with cancer, chronic pain, unprotected and vulnerable. It reveals the vulnerability of being a human being. Living from medical appointment to medical appointment, wondering and worrying about whether my PSA levels, Bone & CT scans are stable or changing. I no longer have the protection of a metaphoric umbrella. I am at the mercy of the elements: pain and cancer.   

My personal texts become foreign even to me as I wonder, “That is not me; who am I now?” Words, actions, and non-actions all become strange and unfamiliar. How we express ourselves needs a new mode of expression when we interpret our new circumstances. (Ricoeur, 1992) Being and becoming transformed by text through what we hear, experience, feel, witness, and interpret also means feeling the suffering, the joy, or the shared understanding of what the knowledgeable other has to say about a topic, a person, a community, or a thing (Gadamer, 1989, 1894; Davey, 2006).

Ageing, cancer, and isolation a withering away… beyond repair

I sometimes feel as though I am beyond repair. After six years of living with cancer and cancer treatments, with 12 years of chronic pain, my hope to return to a full life as I experienced before has become an impossibility. I acknowledge this openly. I offer an interpretation of this dilapidated boat (photo E) as a form of  text about how I perceive my health deteriorating, weakening, and incapacitating even with all the best treatment protocols available. The anxiety fueled by chronic fatigue and treatment side effects escalates as I wait from month to month to receive the results from my next blood tests as text as to whether my PSA levels are good, or my Bone & CT scans demand another year of chemotherapy, or that the next scan shows that the cancer has metastasized to other parts of my body. The text created through illness and disease includes both the biomedical and ontological as the lived experience of the loss of health. However, even though I feel like I am chronically “jet-lagged” with fatigue that I must push through every day and every waking hour, I continue to do so because otherwise the textus of my life could become even more unraveled. It is challenging to live well when everything, pain, and cancer treatments, seems to be counterproductive in helping me to continue. Like the phoenix rising from my own ashes daily, I live to find the motivation to continue to encounter new, more positive texts to interweave into my existing textus.

In contrast to the opening text of the scattered chairs as a metaphor for a life to be lived with chronic pain and cancer, this one speaks to me about isolation. I took this photograph at the bottom of a hill from the hospital where I was undergoing chemotherapy (photo F). Typically, there were many chairs and picnic tables put out for people to sit and chat, have lunch, or just reflect. However, on this day all but this one chair remained as preparation for road work that was to begin shortly. When I encountered this chair as text, it reflected how I was feeling: worn-out and wounded from the series of my first of six chemotherapy sessions in 2019 and unexpectedly, COVID-19 looming around the corner. As I sat in that chair, I reflected on the feelings of trepidation, loss, and my uncertain future. Even though I have my family, friends, and a job at a university that I love, I still feel isolated.  I had previously enjoyed solitude as a chosen time for myself (Hovey, 2021). Currently, in 2024, I completed 10 more chemotherapy sessions, which I was told had stabilized my cancer but not cured me of it (Hovey, 2023).

Cancer is a form of isolation where I am going through physical and ontological feelings somewhat removed from my active previous life. When we talk about isolation, Gadamer (1999) explains that the first thing to understand is that it differs from solitude. Isolation is a form of loss. What is lost is engaging with others in the same way I was able to before my encounters with pain and, of course, cancer. In my experience of isolation, there are, most of the time, levels of suffering that come along with solitude. When I think about my experiences with solitude, I consider two very different aspects of it. Solitude is not always suffering because it is often a choice to get away for a while: a walk, a short trip, or some time alone to think. However, the possibility of returning to others is always present, hence, this might be a mitigating circumstance.  Isolation is different because I do not experience it by choice. To be forsaken by my friends, because of the changes to my pained life or cancer treatments can mean being deprived of the supporting close proximity of others. The unwelcomed burden of isolation imposes a new dimension and loss of my previously shared support. Recreational activities that once brought friends together are now impossible to meaningfully participate in. Work relationships dwindle if I am no longer able to work, and social and intimate relationships can dissolve, where solitude now becomes exclusively isolation.

Conclusions are always provisional

The photograph (photo G) was taken during a walk in Reykjavik, Iceland and the text spoke to me as a person living with cancer and pain that even with these challenges I needed to keep writing, researching and being meaningfully engaged in life. This is more than just showing up but to keep living and “collecting great moments”. Hermeneutically the art of understanding is philosophical in its foundation and therefore takes on a different role rather than theoretical frameworks. The hermeneutic interpretation of text (written words and art) acts to offer a means of reflection about experiences. As a hermeneutic researcher and scholar I have found solace in the examination of my living with cancer and pain through various text that has helped me understand this situation.

In this manuscript, I have offered a concise overview of hermeneutic sensibility, interpretation, aesthetic consciousness, the lifelong search for meaning through personal narratives, and the concept of interpreting various forms of “text”. Next, I demonstrated the remarkable potential of hermeneutics for narrative medicine through reflective and interpretive writing. I hope that readers can build on my reflections and make meaning of them as they ‘speak’ to them in their own lives.

I must remind the reader that having gone through two bouts of chemotherapy and other ongoing treatments that writing can be challenging and may be less-than-perfect.

Texts becomes the invitation to reflect on something that has happened to us and offers the possibility of an interpretation of that event, where the truth is not found in an absolute objective event but rather as a part found within a life-as-a-whole. The inter-subjectivity of experience, which often is quickly dismissed by medical and basic sciences as anecdotal, is taken up within philosophy, not as a method, but rather through the engagement of a hermeneutic perspective and deep inquiry into the meaning of text. Merleau-Ponty (1962) wrote, “the world and man are accessible to two kinds of investigation, in the first case explanatory [scientific] and in the second case reflective [philosophical]” (428). In this context, the art of medicine becomes an ontological engagement with patients that is both guided by the sciences, as well as skills and techniques that maintain a high regard for people seeking care as a person first and then a patient. Medicine could stand to learn from philosophy, where “there are no “experts” only those who are more practiced than others in the art of questioning” (Madison, 2013, 61). Our work together as a patient / researcher with physicians and health researchers, then, is to become more interpretative and to ask better questions, not only from patients and their families, but from our own families, colleagues, friends, and, not least importantly, ourselves. Through this personal questioning and reflection, we become more aware of our personal situatedness and how it influences our interpretive process as we make sense of the text surrounding us.

Acknowledgment
I would like to offer my sincere thank you to Marie Vigouroux MSc. for her help and support in revising and editing this manuscript.

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Photography
All photographs presented in this paper were taken by the author Richard B. Hovey, PhD.

Richard Hovey is an associate professor at McGill University in the Faculty of Dental Medicine and Oral Health Sciences, who has a diverse background including education, qualitative research, and community development with degrees in Education, Physiology and Health Philosophy. His work experiences are equally diverse with expertise in Adult Learning, Community Rehabilitation and Disability studies, Medicine and Dentistry as qualitative researcher interested in a variety of chronic health conditions including chronic pain. He also is a person living with chronic pain for the past 13 years, providing an additional layer of understanding and perspective of living with chronic pain. August 2019, he was diagnosed with advanced metastasized prostate cancer.

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