Full Description
Through vivid and engaging narrative accounts, written and collected by women, Women's Narratives of Health Disruption and Illness: Within and Across Their Life Stories explores how women experience the health disruptions and illnesses that span their lives. The collection examines how women's broader and ongoing life stories impact and are impacted by health disruptions and illnesses. Organized into three parts, the chapters explore "Beginnings" in which health disruptions and illnesses impact early life, motherhood, and where early choices create the origins of health issues that impact later life; "Middles" which explores health experiences in and around middle age, or from the standpoint in middle-age looking back and forth; and "Endings" which explores narratives of ageing and end of life communication. Personal, revealing, and often beautiful, the women's narratives featured in this book will invite the reader into the stories and lives of others, and toward the reflection, learning, and personal transformation that comes from truly connecting with the experiences of others. This book will be helpful for scholars of communication, health, women's studies, family studies, and sociology.
Contents
Chapter 1: This Wasn't How the Story was Supposed to Go: Navigating Unmet Expectations During High-Risk Pregnancies
Chapter 2: "Giving Birth in a Distant Land: Patienthood and Self-transformation of Another Kind"
Chapter 3: A Decade Navigating Food Allergies: A Mother's Narrative
Chapter 4: Growing Up with a Chronic Illness: Easy to Conceal, Even Easier to Forget
Chapter 5: Smoking: A Lifelong Legacy
Chapter 6: Through the Glass Darkly: How We Fill a Diagnosis with Meaning
Chapter 7: Living with Interstitial Cystitis: An Autoethnographic Account of Developing and Coping with a Chronic Condition
Chapter 8: Narrating Menopause with English as a Second Language
Chapter 9: I Like to Read, Play Cribbage—Oh, and I Have Alzheimer's: Managing Interpersonal Relationships and Early Onset Alzheimer's
Chapter 10: Sylvia's Story/The Story of Sylvia: Narrating the Personal and Relational in Patienthood
Chapter 11: Linked Lives: A Narrative Account of Positivity and Dialectics in Mother-Daughter Communication Near the End of Her Life
Chapter 12: A Narrative Account of Father-Daughter Conversations Near the End of His Life
Chapter 13: A Narrative Legacy of Family Caregiving
