This article tries to understand the practice of smoking through the narratives of patients who had mouth cancer. The beginning of the practice of smoking, the relationship between the pleasure of smoking and the need to stop, the suffering caused by cancer, are issues that guided our research. We utilized the history of life as a resource methodology for this purpose, being it the testimony of the subjects' experience, linking the past, present and future of every single patient. In this article we analyze in particular the narratives of five subjects chosen from a universe of thirty patients with mouth cancer, aged over 50 years, residents of the rural area that were attended in a Hospital of Fortaleza, Brazil. The habit of smoking began very early in their lives, by the pursuit of pleasure offered by tobacco, sometimes influenced by the family, the local culture, the images by advertising or to relieve pain and hunger. The disease comes, and with it the suffering of diagnosis, the stigma, the surgery, the sequels, the physical changes and stop smoking. Employees of the country, suffered with hunger, excluded from society, this is the image of them. The pleasure was transformed into pain.
Mouth Neoplasms; Tobacco; Narration
