Woven into the fabric of human existence is the possibility of death and suffering from disease. This essential vulnerability calls forth processes of meaning making, of grappling with uncertainty and morality. In this article we explore the uncertainty and ambiguity that exists in the space between bodily sensations and symptoms of illness. Bodily sensations have the potential to become symptoms of disease or to be absorbed into ordinariness, prompting the question: how do we ascribe meaning to sensations? In the context of middle-class everyday life in Denmark, we show how different potentialities of ambiguous sensations are weighed against each other on a culturally and morally contingent continuum between normal and not normal, uncovering the complex interplay between the body, everyday life, and pervasive biomedical discourses focusing on health promotion, symptom awareness, and care seeking.

Background: The Cancer Home-Life Intervention showed no significant effects, and examination of the processes affecting or inhibiting outcomes is relevant. Aim: To evaluate the Cancer Home-Life Intervention for its processes of implementation, mechanisms of impact and contextual factors. Design: Process evaluation conducted alongside the randomised controlled trial, using quantitative and qualitative methods (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02356627). The Cancer Home-Life Intervention is a tailored, occupational therapy–based programme. Setting/participants: This study took place in participants’ homes and at hospital. A total of 113 home-dwelling adults (⩾18 years) with advanced cancer who had received the Cancer Home-Life Intervention were included, together with five intervention-therapists. Results: All 113 participants (100%) received a first home visit; 32 participants (26%) received a second visit; and 4 participants (3%) received a third visit. Median number of delivered intervention components were 3 (interquartile range: 2; 4). Identified barriers for effect included unclear decision process for intervention dosage; participants’ low expectations; participants’ lack of energy; and insufficient time to adopt new strategies. The trial design constituted a barrier as the intervention could only be provided within a specific short period of time and not when relevant. Intervention components working to solve practical everyday problems, enhance enjoyment and increase a sense of safety were perceived as useful. Conclusion: Future interventions can benefit from inclusion criteria closely related to the intervention focus and clear procedures for when to continue, follow-up and terminate intervention. Decisions about dose and timing may benefit from learning theory by taking into account the time and practice needed to acquire new skills.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Danes undergoing CT scans as part of follow-up testing for potential lung cancer, we explore how access to technologies generates diagnostic uncertainty and trends of continuous testing. Our research is set in the context of a welfare state that has cultivated forms of government whose public health branches focus on early diagnosis and cancer control. Many studies on biotechnologies emphasise subject-making and power relations. Inspired by the work of Veena Das, we adopt an approach that focuses on the entanglement of diagnostic investigations with everyday life. We argue that being followed establishes a mode of being which we call ‘in the meantime’. Life in the meantime is equally characterised by a dramatic mode of being—that is, waiting for death—and an ambiguous mode of being: feeling quite well. As with any life crisis, it involves some sense of agency. We show in this paper how life in the meantime informs an ordinary ethics that encourages three ethical concerns in everyday life: firstly, how to inhabit life in the meantime? Secondly, what good is the testing for? And finally, what is a good death?

This article explores how healthcare-seeking practices and the transformation of bodily sensations into symptoms are embedded in what we term a ‘moral sensescape’ of everyday life. Based on fieldwork in a suburban middle-class neighbourhood in Denmark, we discuss how a moral relation between the Danish welfare state and the middle-class population is embodied in a responsibility for individual health. Overall, we identify a striving to be a ‘good citizen’; this entails conflicting moral possibilities in relation to experiencing, interpreting and acting on bodily sensations. We examine how people meet the conflicting moral possibilities of complying with current public health rhetoric on proper healthcare seeking, including timely presentation of symptoms, and simultaneously try to avoid misusing the healthcare system and be characterised as overly worried or even as a hypochondriac; this challenge constitutes complex navigational routes through the moral sensescape of the Danish middle class.

Approaching the presence of cancer in everyday life in terms of mythologies, the article examines what cancer is and how cancer-related potentialities are enacted and embodied in the context of contemporary regimes of anticipation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a suburban Danish middle-class community among people who were not immediately afflicted by cancer, we describe different and paradoxical cancer mythologies and show how they provide multiple ways of understanding, anticipating, and dealing with cancer in everyday life. Special attention is paid to the relation between biomedically informed notions of symptoms and bodily processes, and a ghostly and muted presence of cancer, particularly when people are faced with more tangible cancer worries. We explore how contemporary cancer disease-control strategies emphasising ‘symptom awareness’ interweave with and add to cancer mythologies. We suggest that these strategies also carry moral significance as directives (be aware of early signs of cancer and seek care in time), and create an unintended illusion of certainty that does not correspond with everyday embodied forms of uncertainty and ambiguity. We argue that paying attention to the continuous cultural configurations of cancer that exist ‘before cancer’ will increase understanding of how the public health construction of ‘cancer awareness’ relates to everyday health practices such as symptom experience and health care seeking.