[Comprehensive Metaphors About the Phenomenon That a Family System Lives When it Takes Care of One of Its Members With Oncological Disease in Advanced Stage: Study of Three Antioquia Families (Colombia)].

OBJECTIVE: To interpret the meanings in the transformations affecting the family system when it takes care of one of its members with oncological disease in advanced stage. METHODS: Hermeneutic phenomenological study. Nine in-depth interviews were conducted. The narrative was used to reach a more genuine appreciation of people as active social beings, and to consider the way to build personal and cultural realities through stories and tales. RESULTS: the comprehensive metaphors that emerged were the experience of the disease as acceptance that generates learning; disease as possibility of internal renewal; and family breakdown in the middle of a vulnerable social structure. CONCLUSIONS: In the interviewees emerge feelings, attitudes and wisdom itself, that allows them to understand what it means for them the experience of a disease such as cancer, which requires mobilizing forces at all levels. Capabilities articulated with some limitations emerged; competencies to learn to care basing on the knowledge, skills and courage to do so were developed; care experience is reconfigured with acts of bravery to overcome the feeling of pain caused by the disease and by difficult family relationships.