Abstract
Patients' work over the course of an illness is usually invisible to standardized medical systems. This is also the case in a project for promoting peritoneal dialysis (PD) in Taiwan. Based on insights into medical practices, this paper explores different types of PD trajectories and experiences and suggests implications for medical practices. Fieldwork, consisting of interviews with 48 patients in focus groups and 8 patients at home practice, yielded six types of PD trajectories--progress, follow, regret, victimized, active explore, and passive explore. Patients' different invisible work on emotion, sociability, and medical knowledge and techniques are also discussed. These efforts illustrate the struggles that patients coordinate through their daily lives and medical schemas. The paper concludes by explicating how the discussion of illness trajectories and invisible works contribute to medical practices,medical sociology, and other theoretical and moral issues. The rationale is that the medical profession and policy makers should take patients' point of view into account and try to support patients with different abilities and backgrounds to do dialysis safely and flexibly rather than choose the already capable patient for the standardized dialysis.