Negotiating Illness in Medical Interactions: Narrative Styles of two Children with Leukaemia

The illness narratives presented in this paper were video‐recorded as part of child patient–staff interaction, during more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork at a paediatric oncology centre. The two children tended to ‘do illness’ differently, producing different types of narrative accounts. One of them presented accounts that invoked ‘fight’ metaphors, whereas the other one invoked patient identities. Also, the medical staff deployed different interactional strategies with different children in response to their narrative constructions of themselves and their leukaemia.