title: Unreliable Bodies: A Follow-up Twenty Years Later by a Mother and Daughter about the Impact of Illness and Disability on their Lives.
abstract: We are a mother and daughter, both health care professionals, who offer a follow-up to an article we published twenty years ago about the impact of each other's ongoing, serious medical problems on our relationship. In this article, we contribute a long-term perspective on the differences between having an illness that is well or poorly understood by medical professionals and the lay community. We also discuss health in the context of identity formation and life stage, as during this interval the daughter left home, graduated college, married, and had two children. Also in this period, the mother survived a third breast cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. We discuss the impact of these experiences on each other and in other important relationships in our lives. Current discourses on daughters of breast cancer survivors do not fit our experience and we speculate about why our story differs. We find that although we continue to contend with serious medical issues that impact our own, each other's, and our families' lives, nonetheless, our lives are rich, rewarding, and "appropriate" for our life stage. That is the news.
authors.affiliation: The Witnessing Project, Berkeley, CA.
authors.forename: Kaethe
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Weingarten
authors.affiliation: Health Science & Recreation, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA.
authors.forename: Miranda
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Worthen
mesh_terms: D016241:Child of Impaired Parents / Q000523:psychology*; D002908:Chronic Disease / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D009034:Mother-Child Relations / Q000523:psychology*; D009035:Mothers / Q000523:psychology*; D009679:Nuclear Family / Q000523:psychology*
keywords: Breast cancer; Identity; Illness; Life-stage; Mother-daughter relationship; cáncer de mama; enfermedad; etapa de la vida; identidad; relación entre madre e hija; 乳腺癌; 母女关系; 生活阶段; 疾病; 身份