Implications and limitations
cancer, weakness, illness
CANCER, RECRUITMENT, STILL
This study provides further insights into how AYA cancer survivors understand themselves after going through cancer therapy while attempting to re‐enter into the lives they once lived. They are forever affected by their experiences. With its narrative approach, this study provides knew knowledge as to how the experiences of young adult survivors are narrated as individual stories of illness and survivorship. We believe this is of great importance because the experiences of the young survivors 1 day will become the experiences of survivors having grown old.One important limitation is the small number of participants. The recruitment of AYA cancer survivors willing to tell their stories is difficult. Surviving cancer is a lonely endeavor possibly still associated with stigma, which means that important voices may not have been heard. Another weakness is the gender balance as only two men wished to participate. Differences in time periods between the different stories have not been investigated due to the small number of participants. It is likely, however, that the participants told their illness stories differently and had achieved different levels of reflexivity regarding their cancer trajectories based on the length of their rehabilitation period and the time since diagnosis. The relatively low sample size may cause a risk of bias as only the stories wanting to be heard were told. Meaning, there is a chance of a “non‐response” as only those feeling strongly about the topic participated thus challenging the variability of the results. Still, qualitative studies can reach saturation at relatively low sample sizes when the objectives are narrowly defined as in this study.