Storytelling and the patient experience: Narratives of breast cancer survivors

honors thesisCollege of HumanitiesEnglishMichael GillsThrough my young life, I have been fortunate enough to be surrounded and supported by a loving and extended family of mothers. Although I will only have one biological mom, I have collected other women as role models and confidantes who have guided and spoken words of encouragement through my most intense years of growth. Collectively, I call them my second moms. After my biological mother's diagnosis with breast cancer, I realized that most of these women I look up to also carried with them histories of breast cancer and many survived their own battles with the disease. The current medical world is one inundated with increasing amounts of technology where medicine becomes a field with fewer face-to-face interactions and more screens. Doctors spend less time with their patients and more time comparing numbers and images. The burgeoning field of narrative medicine, however, offers a perspective of the individual rather than the general masses often referred to in the statistics of disease. It bears witness to the human experience of pain and suffering by engaging the individual story. Through the lens of narrative medicine, this project explores the roles of storytelling in the patient-physician relationship and documents the narratives of eight breast cancer survivors. Each story included was transcribed from an audio recording of the original interview and then appropriate sections were chosen and condensed into a concise, written rendition of each woman's experience. Certain words were changed or deleted, but story content was maintained