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Balancing our lives: a study of the married couple's experience with breast cancer recurrence
1Department of Community Health Care System, University of Washington, Seattle, USA.
Purpose/Objectives:
To examine the married couple's experience with breast cancer recurrence from each partner's own perspective, to describe their mood and martial quality, and to develop an initial explanatory theory of the couple's lived experience with breast cancer recurrence.
Design:
Descriptive, qualitative.
Setting:
Homes of married couples in the Pacific Northwestern United States.
Samples:
15 married couples comprised of women diagnosed with recurrent breast cancer and their husbands. The median length of time since recurrence was 10 months.
Methods:
Structured interviews were conducted in the homes of married couples that met eligibility criteria using an open-ended interview schedule, the Marital Dyad Interview, and two standardized questionnaires-the Spanier Dyadic Adjustment Scale and the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale.
Main Research Variables:
Lived experience of couples to breast cancer recurrence, depressed mood, and marital adjustment.
Findings:
BALANCING OUR LIVES was the core category that explained how the couples lived with the breast cancer recurrence. Couples actively worked to balance their lives by keeping the breast cancer a background, not a foreground, issue. Although couples talked about managing the daily realities of the woman's breast cancer, not dwelling on the cancer and moving ahead and healing themselves was most important. Balancing Our Lives involved the couples in four major processes: managing the woman's everyday illness, surviving, healing, and preparing for death. Concurrently, one or both members of 60% of the couples scored outside the normative range on either depressed mood or marital adjustment.
Conclusions:
The couples' ways of managing the breast cancer recurrence through balancing their lives may be facilitating their behavioral functioning but may not be enhancing their mood or marital quality.
Implications For Nursing Practice:
The couples' management of recurrence may benefit from additional strategies, including helping them work through sad thoughts or feelings instead of avoiding them; recognizing and supporting each other's views, even when their views differ; and helping them to learn ways to express sad thoughts and feelings without overly dwelling on them.