Revisiting family supports through the illness narratives of Korean breast cancer patients: Health/communicative care, emotional support, and everyday maintenance care

This study revisits the meaning of family support through the illness narratives of Korean women with advanced breast cancer. Drawing on in-depth interviews with twenty patients, we reconstruct how such support is experienced and negotiated in everyday life. First, health/communicative care captures the care labor through which family members collect, interpret, and apply medical information and communicate with clinicians. Second, emotional support highlights the ambivalent dynamics of care, in which context expressions of empathy can be both comforting and burdensome, and families’ initial attentiveness may gradually give way to desensitization. Third, everyday maintenance care reframes household chores and childcare as essential practices that help patients preserve a sense of continuity and normalcy amid illness rather than as merely instrumental tasks. We demonstrate that family members act not as passive supporters but rather as therapeutic partners who share in the work of treatment and survival. This study underscores the need for healthcare professionals to recognize families as active participants and to guide them toward forms of support that balance hope with attentiveness to patients’ lived realities. • Illness narratives reveal the ambivalence of family support in lived experience. • Health/communicative care reframes informational support as familial care labor. • Familial emotional support eased anxiety but became burdensome through excess or desensitization. • Everyday maintenance care (housework and childcare) sustains breast cancer patients’ identity and stability. • Korean family support in cancer is strongly oriented toward treatment and recovery.