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Purpose: War metaphors are omnipresent in public and medical discourse on cancer . If some studies suggest that cancer patients may view their experiences as afight, few studies focus on the metaphors that patients create from their subjective experiences. The aim was to better understand the experience of four women with incurabale metastatic breast cancer from the metaphors they used in personal cancer blogs. Methods: An interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to analyze these women's experience and metaphors of cancer. Results: Two metaphors carried the meaning of metastatic breast cancer experience: the fight and the unveiling. The results show that the war metaphor had a unique meaning for the bloggers who lived with incurable breast cancer: they revealed the difficulty of fighting cancer and eventually collapsing in battle, although a renewed look at life had developed in parallel to their struggle. The bloggers thus tried to lift the veil on this complex experience. Conclusion: The results highlight the need for women with metastatic breast cancer to be able to tell and share their experience in a supportive context and to reinvest the war metaphor in order to express themselves in a more authentic way.

Background: A presence of quality is recognized as a central competence for palliative care clinicians in their mission to accompany patients and families in their end-of-life journey. However, PC clinicians’ capacity for presence may be affected by the increasing emotional, professional and organizational demands of their working environment. Those demands may, in turn, affect quality of care and clinicians’ health. To our knowledge, no previous study has aimed at a better understanding of how PC clinicians view and experience presence in their day-to-day work, although this holds the potential of generating insights to help clinicians develop and cultivate a high-quality presence towards dying patients.Methods: We conducted in-depth qualitative semi-structured interviews with 10 PC clinicians working on a specialized PC ward, later analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.Results: Results account for three essential themes describing the experience of presence; connection to the self, to the other and to the meaning of care. Results also suggest that presence was lived and experienced within a very particular relation to time, which appeared to our participants as a significant challenge in achieving high-quality presence.Conclusion: The stressful working environment in which PC clinicians daily evolve appeared as a threat to presence for our participants. Paradoxically, cultivating presence with mindfulness may be a promising tool to better cope with the competing demands of work and to foster clinicians’ resilience to stress.