Some survivors live with 'gift' of breast cancer

By Jill Mitchell

Finding a strong sense of meaning in life isn't always easy. Paradoxically, confronting our own mortality is what it sometimes takes. Research shows that people dealing with serious, even terminal, illness often find positive meaning, personal growth or benefits from their illness experience. But what is it that such people find?

To address that question, I spent the past few years conducting in-depth interviews with 23 women living with a life-threatening disease: metastatic breast cancer. Despite their enormous suffering, roughly half of them talked about how they found something positive in their experience with cancer.

One of the most common benefits was a helpful change in perspective, especially a keener awareness, clarity and focus that accompanied an enhanced sense of appreciation of life's everyday moments. Some of the women in the study went as far as to call cancer a "gift" — a few even talked about how they were more joyful, happier and more spiritually connected than they had been before falling ill.

Despite numerous losses, most of the women also claimed an improvement in certain aspects of their sense of self. They stated they had become stronger, more confident, more aware of their personal resources, less socially inhibited and more likely to stand up for themselves.

For some, this emerged out of the awareness of how alone they were in living with life-threatening illness and out of the necessity of becoming their own advocates in the medical world. For others, learning to ask for help and seeing how people rallied around them in their time of need made them feel more loved, thereby strengthening their self-esteem.

Although cancer sometimes brought out the worst in loved ones and friends, more than half of the women in the study reported overall improvements in their relationships. Ironically, despite living with a time-limiting illness, a majority also claimed feeling more patient and more compassionate toward people in general. Firsthand experience with suffering acted to increase their understanding of how to help others.

Surprisingly, some women also spoke about how they felt less stressed and less worried since living with cancer, partly because they felt more justified in releasing themselves from negative people and events in their lives.

Still, cancer is cruel, and not everyone finds solace in approaching suffering this way. Well-meaning friends and family members overly eager to encourage women stricken by cancer to "think positively" may add to the frustration and isolation of those who happen to have a healthy need to express their suffering and to have their losses validated.

Hence, although it is encouraging to know that positive growth and benefits may be gained in response to great suffering, it is also important to be sensitive to the fact that the expectation that one should find positive meaning can impose an added burden upon people living with cancer.

Mitchell is a postdoctoral fellow in the Division for Cancer Prevention and Control Research at the School of Public Health and the Jonsson Cancer Center.