In this article we examine how patients of elective orthopaedic surgery might transform the understanding of their body’s fixability over time. The article builds on an ethnographic fieldwork at an elective orthopaedic unit in Denmark and follow-up interviews with two patients eighteen months after their surgery. Through the affective theoretical framework of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, we discuss how the patients experience the part-loss of functionality. We trace the transformations in their expectations of their body through their use of metaphors. Drawing on Alan Bleakley’s division of the metaphors of the body into ‘body-as-machine’ and ‘body-as-ecology’, we argue that patients end up describing their bodies through both these metaphors, and come to understand their bodies as not being fixable, but as being in ongoing process.
