Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on strategies of coping with disease of kidney recipients after realizing that the transplant is just a different treatment of the same illness. The patient is surounded by individualizing discourses through which he must make new senses of a body re-shaped by the transplant.

Paper long abstract:

A new kidney brings the promise of a new life for sufferers of renal disease going through dialysis. The transplant surgery is promoted by the health system and NGOs as a cure which will restore the patient`s body autonomy and life-style disrupted by the failing kidney. However, after the surgery the patient finds himself in a different reality. Dietary constraints and strong immunosuppressive medication with short and long-term side effects are limiting the improved body autonomy. The transplant becomes a different treatment for the same old diseased organism. Through this paper, I will focus on the new relationship between body and disease that are emerging after the transplant from patients disillusioned by the promise of the "gift" of life. By using ethnographic data collected from members of Romania`s biggest recipient NGO, I will show that the patients must deal with the disease in an ambiguous context created at the interstice of the medical and social levels. The indi

vidualizing ideology of modern medicine is a key factor of understanding the habitus constraining patients to embody their disease. Is it just your own disease for whose evolution you must be held responsible? It`s a question whose answer is shaped through interactions with medical staff, media, psychologists, dieticians and other recipients. Emerging body-illness relationships are ranging from disease as a "partner" as one recipient pointed out, or as something better to "refuse" as did another recipient.