Department of Humanities

Penn State College of Medicine

Breast Cancer Inside Out: Bodies, Biographies & Beliefs

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Purple background and rainbow colored nautilus with the title of the book "Breast Cancer Inside OutBreast Cancer Inside Out: Bodies, Biographies & Beliefs
by Kimberly Myers, Ph.D.

This book offers a 360° look at breast cancer from individuals who have intimate understanding of and experience with it: patients who have lived or are living with the disease; healthcare providers whose perspectives patients and families rarely get to know; and researchers and scholars who examine breast cancer through various scientific and cultural lenses. Here you will meet 33 individuals from the UK and US who provide both factual information and personal insights in different forms: historical overview, personal essay, interview, play script, poem, interpersonal vignette, practical guidelines, comic, mixed-media photography exhibit and scholarly analysis.

Breast cancer changes lives. This book is meant to be a single go-to source for people who want to understand more fully and clearly the lived experience of breast cancer – what those who know it best think and do and feel.

“When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I searched for a single book that would provide the wide-ranging information I needed: scientific facts about diagnosis, treatment and outcomes; practical advice on how best to navigate the system; historical, socio-cultural and artistic perspectives on the disease; stories from patients; personal insights by professionals who care for breast cancer patients.  I found no such book.  So six years after my diagnosis, I decided to create it.  This is the book I wish I’d had.”    ~Kimberly

Contents: Titles and Description of Authors

Part 1   A Trajectory of Breast Cancer: Diagnosis, Treatment and Beyond
  • When the Patient Knows What the Doctor Does Not (Yet) Know (mammographer & patient)
  • A Step-by-Step Guide through Breast Cancer Diagnosis and Radiation (nurse navigator & radiation oncologist)
  • Communion (surgical oncologist)
  • Reconstruction (poet-patient)
  • Gauging Too Much Information: Discussing a Young Mother’s Options for Reconstructive Surgery (plastic surgeon)
  • Flashpoints: Wisdom from the Trenches (patient)
  • Another Catcher in the Rye: Oncology Care at the County Hospital (medical oncologist)
  • Reflections on Solidarity (chaplain)
  • When Chaos Comes (hospitalist)
  • Best-Laid Plans: When Follow-Up Fails (internist)
  • Always on Your Side: What All Patient Should Know about Palliative Care (palliative care physician)
  • How Hospice Can Heal (hospice physician)
  • A Steward of Suffering: One Man’s Story of Breast Cancer (patient)
Part 2   Enhancing Your Health by Honoring Your Self
  • Our Many Teachers: Wisdom for Psychological Health during Breast Cancer (oncology psychologist)
  • All You Need Is Love…and Research: A Mother-Son Team Navigate a Non-Aggressive Approach to Breast Cancer (patient
  • & medical anthropologist)
  • I Promise You Will Feel Better: The Importance of Exercising During and After Cancer Treatment (exercise oncology
  • researcher)
  • Food as Medicine: How to Eat During and After Treatment for Breast Cancer (nutritionist)
  • A Future on Ice (fertility patient)
  • Intimacy and Sexuality in the Context of Breast Cancer (sex therapist)
Part 3   Shaping Cancer, (Re)Shaping Self
  • On Being Constant and Changed: Breast Cancer in Six Acts (medical ethicist)
  • Women’s Breast Cancer Poetry: Voice, Identity, Contingency and Death (medical humanities scholar)
  • Under the Birdcage (comics artist-author)
  • Breast Cancer in the Classroom and the Clinic (comics scholar/medical educator)
  • A Curator’s Interpretation of Edges of Light (curator)
  • Edges of Light: Images of Breast Transformation (professional photographer/literary scholar-patient)
  • The Form (poet-patient)
Part 4   Breast Cancer over Time: Evolutions in Understanding, Representations, Tools and Treatments
  • Milestones in the Depiction of Breasts and Breast Cancer in Art History (art historian)
  • Breast Art (poet-patient)
  • An Historical Overview of Breast Cancer and Its Treatments (family member/surgeon-scientist)
  • Radiation Therapy: Evolutions in /treatment, Consultations in Clinic (radiation oncologist)
  • Understanding How Cancer Behaves: Implications for Paradigm Shifts in Treatment (cancer historian/surgeon-scientist)
  • Genetic Counseling and Testing for Hereditary Breast Cancer (genetics counselor)
  • The Marketing of Metastatic Breast Cancer: A Cultural Analysis of the Ibrance Commercial (cultural studies scholar)
  • The New Normal: Metastatic Breast Cancer Experiences of Survivor Identity (health communication researcher/patient)
  • Support Group (poet-patient)Breast Cancer Inside Out can be purchased at Amazon

Get your copy of Breast Cancer Inside Out at Amazon.

Graphic Medicine Manifesto

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GMMCoverGRAPHIC MEDICINE MANIFESTO
Michael J. Green M.D. and Kimberly R. Myers, Ph.D., M.A. along with MK Czerwiec, Ian Williams, Susan Merrill Squier, and Scott T. Smith

Graphic Medicine is an exciting new book series from Penn State Press. Curated by an editorial collective with scholarly, creative, and clinical expertise, the series is inspired by a growing awareness of the value of comics as an important resource for communicating about a range of issues broadly termed “medical.” For medical practitioners, patients, and families and caregivers dealing with illness and disability, graphic narrative enlightens complicated or difficult experiences. For scholars in literary, cultural, and comics studies, the genre articulates a complex and powerful analysis of illness, medicine, and disability and a rethinking of the boundaries of “health.” The series will be diverse in its approach. It will include monographic studies and edited collections from scholars, practitioners, and medical educators, as well as original comics from artists and non-artists alike, such as self-reflective “graphic pathographies” or comics used in medical training and education, providing a creative way to learn and teach.

The Patient: Global Perspectives

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The patientThe Patient: Global Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Kimberly Myers, M.A., Ph.D.
While pain and suffering are universal, the experience,understanding, and expression of them are not. What it means to be a patient is unique to each individual: for example, what one person experiences as bothersome back pain, another might experience as debilitating. But patienthood also depends on one’s culture, both broadly and more narrowly defined (e.g., one’s ethnicity on the one hand and one’s immediate social circle on the other). Illness is a phenomenon constructed – sometimes passively, sometimes actively – according to the core values of the culture(s) of which the patient is a part. The Patient: Global Interdisciplinary Perspectives seeks to raise critical consciousness of issues confronting patients and contribute to a richer understanding of how one’s culture impacts the lived experience of disease. The chapters in this collection provide a snapshot of situations as they exist in a particular cultural and historical moment. Their long-term value lies in providing important historical documentation of where we are as an international community in the first decade of the 21st century. Hopefully, we can use such historical reminders as yardsticks to measure our progress in healthcare accessibility and funding as we reflect on the similarities and differences that exist between people across the globe, and among the particular communities in which they live.

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