Lived experience of chronic pain and fibromyalgia: women's stories from daily life.

The hermeneutic-phenomenological study presented in this article is grounded in a lifeworld perspective. The authors aimed at rich descriptions of women's lived experience of chronic pain and fibromyalgia. They conducted individual life-form interviews with 12 women with fibromyalgia. On the basis of the women's stories, three typologies were developed: at the will of the treacherous body-powerlessness; struggling to escape the treacherous body- ambivalence; and caring for the treacherous body-coping. The lived experience described in the typologies were further interpreted according to the existentials: lived body, lived time and space, and lived relations. The women's stories point to a world experienced as fundamentally changed by a body in chronic pain, describing a struggle in which they feel that their existence is at stake.