Experience of the Young Women with Early Stage Breast Cancer: A Qualitative Study

The cells in the breast begin to grow out of control is called as breast cancer. This is classified into stage zero to stage four according to the amount of severity and nature of spread. During early stage, diagnosis of the cancer and beginning of treatments are directly affected to quality of life of the young women. Most of women have unpleasant physical, psychological, and sociocultural experience due to impairments and functional limitation secondary to breast cancer. Purpose is to explore the experience of the young women with early stage breast cancer at oncology unit in Provincial General Hospital Kurunegala. A phenomenological design was carried out to explore the experience of young women with early stage of breast cancer. Twenty participants were purposively selected diagnosed with breast cancer within 3 to 6 months, who are attending to the oncology unit at Provincial General Hospital Kurunegala. Ethical approval was obtained from the Ethics Review Committee of the same hospital. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data and thematic analyze was used for the analysis. Three major themes were derived from the data. Major themes are severe physical discomfort due to disease condition, emotional disturbances and impaired socio-economic life. Severe physical discomfort is commonly due to pain, loss of appetite and nausea, body image changes and barriers to day to day activities. Emotional disturbances mostly have seen as a result of depression, anxiety, fear of recurrence and uncertainty about life. Lack of family support, social support and decline economic status were affected to impaired socio-economic life. It is concluded that pain was the mostly faced discomfort. Anxiety and depression have seen in high extent once they heard about the disease condition and after. Patients suffered a lot as decline their economic status because of left the job and frequent hospitalizations. All these experiences collectively affect to the quality of life in early stage breast cancer patients. Hence, it is recommended to educate the patients about the coping mechanisms in advance