Women's Narratives of Health Disruption and Illness

Jennifer M. Hawkins is assistant professor of communication studies at Saint Cloud State University.Peter M. Kellett is professor of communication studies at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

This book, the fifth volume in the "Lexington Studies in Health Communication" series, features a collection of women's narratives regarding health disruptions and illness. All volumes in this series emphasize the importance of communication in health care, aiming to assist providers with hearing and interpreting individual stories of patient experiences. Kellett (Univ. of North Carolina at Greensboro) and Hawkins (St. Cloud State Univ.) have organized 13 narratives in terms of life development stages, forming the three parts of the book: "Beginnings," "Middles," and "Endings and Legacies." Contributors focus their interviews on questions related to communication, relationships, disruptions, and the impact of those disruptions on women's lives. Several chapters include follow-up discussions and references. Helpfully indexed, this compilation provides clear, unique perspectives and analyses of women's experiences as consumers of health care, with the purpose of enlightening students, faculty, and providers about the little-known perspectives, challenges, and conclusions of their clients. A real contribution to health communication scholarship. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. General readers.

• Chapter 1: This Wasn’t How the Story was Supposed to Go: Navigating Unmet Expectations During High-Risk PregnanciesChapter 2: “Giving Birth in a Distant Land: Patienthood and Self-transformation of Another Kind”Chapter 3: A Decade Navigating Food Allergies: A Mother’s NarrativeChapter 4: Growing Up with a Chronic Illness: Easy to Conceal, Even Easier to ForgetChapter 5: Smoking: A Lifelong LegacyChapter 6: Through the Glass Darkly: How We Fill a Diagnosis with MeaningChapter 7: Living with Interstitial Cystitis: An Autoethnographic Account of Developing and Coping with a Chronic ConditionChapter 8: Narrating Menopause with English as a Second LanguageChapter 9: I Like to Read, Play Cribbage—Oh, and I Have Alzheimer’s: Managing Interpersonal Relationships and Early Onset Alzheimer’sChapter 10: Sylvia’s Story/The Story of Sylvia: Narrating the Personal and Relational in PatienthoodChapter 11: Linked Lives: A Narrative Account of Positivity and Dialectics in Mother-Daughter Communication Near the End of Her LifeChapter 12: A Narrative Account of Father-Daughter Conversations Near the End of His LifeChapter 13: A Narrative Legacy of Family Caregiving