When the last chemotherapy session ends and the hospital doors close behind a woman who has just survived breast cancer, the hardest part of her illness may be only beginning. That is the central message of a new qualitative study from the University of the Faroe Islands, published in Frontiers in Oncology, which explored how seven Faroese breast cancer survivors experience life in the weeks, months and years after treatment completion. The research team used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, guided by Gadamerian hermeneutics, to examine how late effects — health problems that emerge months or years after diagnosis or treatment — become embedded in the texture of ordinary life. Their findings describe survivorship not as a return to normality but as an ongoing, exhausting process of adaptation, identity renegotiation and social negotiation, made more difficult by limited follow-up support and by symptoms that others cannot see.
The Faroe Islands offer a distinctive setting for such research. This small North Atlantic archipelago records approximately 29 new breast cancer diagnoses per year, according to the NORDCAN database for 2019 to 2023, making breast cancer one of the most common cancers among Faroese women. Fifty years ago, Faroese cancer patients were referred entirely to the Danish healthcare system, but breast cancer treatment is now shared between the two countries, with a Faroese oncology specialist permanently appointed at the National Hospital since 2019 and visiting specialists travelling regularly to the islands. This cross-border arrangement raises the demands on communication and continuity between two healthcare systems with very different resources. Yet despite these organizational advances, little was known about how Faroese women experience the aftermath of treatment — a gap the study set out to fill by examining what late effects are present and how they impact everyday life, which the researchers define as the routine, repetitive, taken-for-granted practices of the mundane ordinary world.
Methodologically, the study is a careful piece of qualitative science. Seven women, aged 49 to 68 at the time of interview, who had completed primary treatment between 2011 and 2024, were recruited through the Faroese Cancer Society, a breast cancer support group, and snowball sampling after only three participants came forward through conventional channels. All seven had undergone breast surgery and axillary lymph node surgery, six had received chemotherapy, six radiotherapy, and all seven reported endocrine therapy. Data were collected in November 2025 through two semi-structured focus group interviews, one with five participants and one conducted in a dyadic format after a third participant withdrew due to work commitments, each lasting approximately 120 minutes. The interviews were conducted and transcribed verbatim in Faroese, and the analysis was performed on the Faroese transcripts, with only selected quotations translated into English afterward — a decision that preserved cultural nuance, including the Faroese term møði, which can convey tiredness, exhaustion or weariness depending on context and was rendered as fatigue.
The analysis, informed by Gadamerian hermeneutics as a sensitizing philosophical perspective on the researchers’ pre-understanding and openness, yielded four overarching themes. The first and most physically dominant was that fatigue sets the agenda for everyday life. Participants described a treatment-related exhaustion that differed fundamentally from ordinary tiredness — persistent, draining, and, in their words, indescribable to anyone who had not experienced it. One participant compared cleaning an entire house to running a marathon, leaving her exhausted for a whole month afterward. Another explained that she could manage two active days, but would then crash completely on the third. Energy levels fluctuated across the day and between women, with some at their best in the morning and others only after eleven o’clock, forcing participants to learn to work around their fatigue through continuous planning and energy management, scheduling rest, postponing commitments, and avoiding plans for the day after any demanding activity.
Fatigue extended far beyond household chores into professional and social existence. Several participants had left employment or entered early retirement; those who remained in paid work described coming home completely exhausted and needing recovery time. One participant explained that she no longer dared to volunteer because she could not predict whether she would have the energy on a given Tuesday or Thursday, calling it very frustrating to cancel after promising to help. Participants described their energy as being consumed by just existing — a phrase the moderator tested back to the group and the participants affirmed. Some women had learned to accept the limitation, saying there was no use in fighting it, while others continued to resist it actively. Rather than representing opposing positions, the researchers interpret these accounts as different ways of adapting to the same persistent reality: fatigue as an all-encompassing late effect that continuously structures what survivors can do, when they can do it, and how they plan their lives.
The second theme captured an emotional rupture at the point of discharge: the transition from supported patient to abandoned survivor. Participants described the end of treatment as a sudden loss of structured support, accompanied by inadequate information about follow-up care, leaving them in states they described as shock, lost and lonely. One participant offered a striking metaphor, describing treatment as being a cotton ball sent gently through a cotton tube, where every collision was a soft landing — until the tube ended and she stood at its edge looking out at everything empty and black, forced to take the first step with no idea what lay beneath or beside her. Another compared the trajectory to a tsunami: the diagnosis crashes in and destroys everything, treatment brings relief as the wave recedes, but the third phase is the aftermath, where survivors are dropped into a black hole and left alone to piece everything back together.
Remarkably, several participants described the period after treatment as emotionally more distressing than receiving the diagnosis itself. One woman called it the worst part of the entire illness trajectory, recalling the panic she felt when chemotherapy ended and she was suddenly at home alone with nothing to go back to, after months of being watched over so closely that even a small twinge was checked. Another affirmed this as the darkest feeling, terribly lonely, describing the need to build blindly and find where the walls are. The researchers suggest that some emotional responses may be deferred during treatment, as participants stay strong for everyone else, only surfacing after the clinical machinery has moved on. Discharge, in this reading, does not signal a return to normality but the beginning of a new and uncertain phase — survivorship experienced as almost anticlimactic, revealing the full extent of emotional late effects rather than bringing closure.
The third theme traced how this rupture disrupts and reconstructs the sense of self. Participants reported being so very much changed after treatment, with everything rearranged: sensory disturbances in hands and feet that made shoes unwearable and caused objects to fall from their grip, cognitive changes including forgetfulness and lost concentration, balance problems that led one woman to spend her days looking down and listening to confirm her foot was on the floor. Professional identities contracted — several women reduced to one working day per week — and cherished hobbies became inaccessible, with one participant describing the pain of lying beside yarn and needles she no longer had the energy to use. One woman said she had become someone else and needed to get to know herself again, something she had neither anticipated nor been prepared for. Over time, a gradual movement from resistance toward adaptation emerged, involving learning to listen to the body, recognizing new limits, prioritizing and planning, and — faced with mortality — a re-evaluation of what makes life meaningful. One participant even reported becoming a better person despite the hardship.
The fourth theme addressed the social invisibility of these struggles. Because survivors often look recovered, their internal experience goes unrecognized: you look so good, others say, while inside everything is a mess. Participants described becoming completely drained in social gatherings, with one comparing her hypersensitivity to heat, cold and environmental change to the immature senses of a premature infant whose skin chemotherapy had opened everything up. The need for daytime rest was misread as laziness — one participant recalled her son-in-law telling her to get up and make herself useful — forcing women to socially justify limitations that should have been self-evident. Many withdrew from social life, attending only events where absence would be unacceptable, and described a terrible loneliness because no one who had not experienced cancer treatment could understand it. The researchers note that in the socially interconnected Faroese context, withdrawal itself becomes highly visible, adding another dimension to the consequences of invisible late effects.
The authors conclude that survivorship in the Faroe Islands is shaped not only by individual late effects but by social, geographical and organizational conditions, including care pathways that extend across the Faroese and Danish healthcare systems. Participants generally found the medical treatment satisfactory but described long-term follow-up and rehabilitation as less structured, and the loss of support at treatment’s end also meant losing established connections with professionals abroad. The study has limitations: the sample was small and self-selected, recruitment through support networks may have overrepresented women still affected by late effects, participants completed treatment across different organizational periods from 2011 to 2024, and the use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis with focus group data means individual meaning-making cannot be fully separated from group interaction. All participants had received endocrine therapy, so some symptoms may reflect ongoing treatment rather than completed primary treatment. The findings are not statistically generalizable but offer transferable insights for other small-scale societies. The authors call for structured survivorship pathways — individualized information, access to rehabilitation, continuity of follow-up across borders, and a more gradual transition from the healthcare system — pointing to Iceland’s Cancer Rehabilitation Center Ljósið as a relevant model for small island settings.
Subject of Research: Health Medicine
Article Title: Living beyond treatment: late effects and everyday life in Faroese breast cancer survivors
Article References: Glyn-Davies, B. F., Hansen, M., Ólavsdóttir, P. K., & Davidsen, A. H. (2026). Living beyond treatment: late effects and everyday life in Faroese breast cancer survivors. Frontiers in Oncology, 16, Article 1944286. https://doi.org/10.3389/fonc.2026.1944286
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.3389/fonc.2026.1944286
Keywords: breast cancer, cancer survivors, late effects, fatigue, Faroe Islands, qualitative research, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, survivorship care, cross-border healthcare, cancer rehabilitation, Living, beyond
