Living with bodily strangeness: women's experiences of their changing and unpredictable body following a stroke.

The authors' aim in this phenomenologial and feminist study was to gain a deeper understanding of how female stroke survivors experienced their body after a stroke. They recruited 25 women in a rural area in eastern Norway who had suffered a first-time stroke and interviewed them in depth three times each during the first 1 1/2 to 2 years following the stroke. The data analysis was inspired by phenomenological method. The stroke survivors' experiences of their bodies were characterized by profound, disturbing, and, in part, unintelligible changes during the onset and the process of recovery from the stroke. Their experiences can be summarized under three major themes: The Unpredictable Body, The Demanding Body, and The Extended Body.