Ruptures and sutures: time, audience and identity in an illness narrative[Note 1. Considerable invisible work lies behind this article, especially discussions ...]

First‐person accounts of the illnesses experienced by sociologists have taken hybrid experimental forms. I add my voice to this growing tradition with a story about the discovery and treatment of a soft tissue sarcoma in my thigh, chronicled in a journal I kept over many months. The fragments scribbled in the journal became the basis of an extended illness narrative. I interrogate features of the narrative itself, including the handling of time and imagined audiences – those I was writing for. The illness narrative traces how cancer transformed the many identities I enact on a daily basis and how the invisible labour of particular health workers enabled the restoration of several prized identities. These workers – radiation, occupational and physical therapists – are typically subordinated in the medical hierarchy and the interactional work that they do with patients to restore and reconfigure ruptured identities after serious illness needs attention in medical sociology.