'You don't want to look like that for the rest of your life': Contested Discourses of Loss in a Normative Societal Context

Abstract

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women globally, affecting around one in eleven women and accounting for 21 per cent of all new cases. The majority of women survive after surgery, often followed by radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy. For optimal outcome, however, women must make relatively prompt decisions regarding treatment pathways, including those concerning segmental mastectomy, lumpectomy, or radical mastectomy (and variants), immediate or postponed reconstructive surgery, and type of implant or tissue flap. Their decisions are informed by biomedical and social discourses relating to risk, prognosis, recovery and deficit. Increasingly the choices are set out very evenly on web-..