ABSTRACT
My interest in fatigue grew out of discussions with the oncology nurses with whom I worked in the early 1990s. The nurses had become increasingly concerned about the frequency and severity of fatigue in their patients, and had questions about what nurses could do to support these individuals and their families. In this chapter I will trace our journey from their clinical observations to where we are today and show how we used qualitative research to learn about the nature of fatigue. I will begin with a description of the clinical observations that caught our interest and our identification of behavioral patterns that distinguished those with fatigue from those without fatigue. I will then provide a brief review of the literature as it was at the time I began studying fatigue and describe how we used this work to reconceptualize fatigue. In the third section I present the conceptual framework for the prevention and management of fatigue that we developed based on our qualitative studies. I also describe several new areas of inquiry that grew out of our conceptual work, including our work related to symptom clusters and the social construction of fatigue. Finally, I discuss some of the implications of our work for clinical practice, education and research.
