Beyond Breast Cancer: How four women experience breast cancer |
Research Question
After four semi-structured interviews and a thorough literature review, we identified commonalities in how women with breast cancer experience and perceive their illness. Women felt that their illness was a life-changing experience, and that cancer had a particular stigma attached to it. However, their beliefs and support systems were variable. This had a profound impact on the disparate ways they sought treatment and on the choices they made.
The Interviewees
What drew us to this topic initially was the fact that we all knew women with breast cancer. However, once talking through what we knew about their experiences with the cancer, we realized how variable their treatment, healing, health-seeking behaviors, and illness journeys were.
CarlaCarla is a middle-aged woman who grew up in Spanish Harlem, what she describes as a predominantly lower-income Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City. She was diagnosed with B3 lesions of uncertain malignant potential. Her providers decided on an aggressive treatment regimen, including chemotherapy, radiation, and a lumpectomy. She is currently attending chemotherapy, and suffers from fatigue and breathlessness. She is afraid of losing her hair.
Halina |
MeganMegan is a Caucasian upper middle class 59 year old mother of two. She was diagnosed with breast cancer seven years ago. After receiving a clean mammogram Megan went in for an ultrasound due to her dense breast tissue which is how she discovered her diagnosis. Megan still experiences affects of her chemotherapy such as neuropathy and loss of appetite. She still struggles with her health and has since had bladder and uterine cancer and fears of relapse.
Christine |
Halina is a 59 year old Russian immigrant from St. Petersburg. After moving to the US, she began receiving her routine mammograms at age 45. Around this time, she also took the BRCA genetic screening test for breast cancer, and it came back negative. After her first couple of mammograms, Halina was told she had dense breast tissue and needed to receive ultra sounds in addition to her mammograms in order to effectively screen her breasts.
At age 55, Halina was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer via the ultrasound recommended by her doctor. She was given 2 years to live, even with the mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. Halina knew she would never survive the chemotherapy and desperately begged her doctor for more options; she was told she had no choice. Halina ended up receiving a lumpectomy and afterwards visited a nutritionist she knew to get supplements to aid her during chemotherapy. However, instead of leaving the office with herbs, she left with a book called Knockout: Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer by Suzanne Somers and the idea of potentially curing her breast cancer with Complementary and Alternative Medicine rather than the conventional biomedical techniques. After changing her life style using CAMs techniques, Halina is now cancer free since April of 2019. To learn more about her CAM experience, click below. |
Christine is a Caucasian, Jewish, middle class mother of two girls. She has had two rounds of breast cancer and two rounds of thyroid cancer. She still gets monthly preventative shots which will continue for the rest of her life. Through all her rounds of treatment including a mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation, Christine keeps a positive and happy outlook on life and her cancer experience.
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Common Trends
Types of Breast Cancer |
Breast Cancer IN the biomedical world |
The common threads
key themes
These women perceived and treated their breast cancer in different ways.
However, taking the illness experiences as a collective, there were many similarities; stark differences masked a few profound common denominators.
Use the buttons below to navigate each woman's illness experience in the context of one of the four identified common denominators.
However, taking the illness experiences as a collective, there were many similarities; stark differences masked a few profound common denominators.
Use the buttons below to navigate each woman's illness experience in the context of one of the four identified common denominators.
Disclaimer: We acknowledge that our findings might not be representative of all breast cancer patients. We had a limited, convenience sample size of four women for our ethnographic interviews; we can only speak to the experiences of these four women. Please enjoy.
Website created by:
Yuliya Faryna, Emma Zeiger, and Jordyn Dickey
Yuliya Faryna, Emma Zeiger, and Jordyn Dickey