Surviving: One Family's Experience with Cancer

Introduction On the eve of my 16th birthday, my father was diagnosed with cancer. He had a tumor in his nose that had been growing for some time. He waited until after my Sweet Sixteen party to have the tumor excavated. He went through radiation to treat the cancer, and had his nose completely removed. A new nose was built, but collapsed due to the radiation, and my father got a third nose. Skin was stretched from his forehead to cover the nose. Cartilage was taken from his ear and bone from his rib to remake a nose. He endured surgery after surgery, procedure after procedure, to repair his face. Though he still has the scars from his many surgeries, he was declared cancer-free in 2003 and has been a cancer-survivor ever since. The ordeal affected us all and changed our perspectives on life and of each other. Literatures Informing the Inquiry Storytelling about events is common among humans (Salander, 2002). This human activity intensifies when we experience something dramatic, like an illness. Facing an illness, especially a potentially fatal one, leads to an emotional experience that is potentially life-changing (Anderson & Martin, 2009). Illness narratives are becoming more popular as doctors are focusing on the patient's journey through their illness, instead on just the diagnosis itself. Most researchers define a narrative as something with a beginning, middle, and end and is unique from discourse (Hyden, 1997, p. 50). Illness narratives are powerful, as they can be utilized to study not only medicine, but the experience of the illness and "its social and cultural underpinnings" (p. 48). Through illness narratives, patients "give voice to suffering in a way that lies outside the domain of the biomedical voice" and "discover new ways to talk about" and deal with the illness and themselves as cancer patients (Geist & Dreyer, 1993, as cited in Anderson & Martin, 2009, p. 134; Hyden, 1997, p. 49). Narratives can also be utilized to show how a shared experience or understanding can alter the interpretation of an experience (Garro, 1994, p. 775). Patients feel more empowered and can heal through the act of writing an illness narrative (Anderson & Martin, 2009; Hyden, 1997). Illness narratives are conceived around what the narrator judges to be worth writing about (Garro, 1994, p. 785). Sufferers appreciate the control, and can find writing about the experience soothing. These narratives give sufferers a way to explain the experience in their own words (Hyden, 1997, p. 51). This can be powerful, especially at a time when patients and their families feel powerless. However, most illness narratives are written from the perspective of the patient and their spouse. There is little written from an immediate family perspective, including children. In this study, I sought to explain my family's experience with my father's illness, and fill the gap by providing perspectives from his children. Background Information Pertinent to the Study My father, mother, younger sister, and I participated in this study. I asked each of them to write a narrative describing their experience with my father's cancer. I encouraged each to write anything they remembered, starting with my father's misdiagnosis and ending with him being cancer-free. I also asked them to include their opinion of how his cancer has changed or affected our family, and how we dealt with the illness. Methodology Research Question I was interested in our stories of this event. The research questions guiding my inquiry were: 1. How did we each view the experience? 2. In what ways would our stories be different? Though we all experienced the same phenomenon, we may have viewed it differently, thus having unique stories of the event. In order to answer the research questions, the most appropriate theoretical foundation was for the inquiry was a phenomenological case study. …