Hope and despair: the awakening of hope following acute spinal cord injury-an interpretative study.

The aim of this paper was to explore the patients' experiences of hope during the first months following acute spinal cord injury. This qualitative study has a descriptive and explorative design. Data were collected by personal interviews (N = 10) at a rehabilitation centre in Norway. A phenomenological-hermeneutic approach inspired by Ricoeur was used to extract the meaning content of the patients' experiences. The findings revealed one main interpretation; the awakening of hope, expressed by two themes: hope and despair, and uncertainty. Awakening hopes, even sometimes silent hopes, constituted a contextual background in the immediate aftermath of spinal cord injury.