Living with lymphedema: A qualitative study of women’s perspectives on prevention and management following breast cancer-related treatment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A phenomenological research method was used to investigate the experience of lymphedema in 13 women following breast cancer-related treatment. The women, ranging in age from 45 to 82, living on the east coast of Canada, had lymphedema of the upper extremity for at least one year, and had no evidence of active cancer disease. Semi-structured interviews were used to examine the physical and psychosocial suffering that women with lymphedema experienced. The lack of appropriate pre-intervention education and post-intervention support by health care professionals as well as the lack of effective protocols to prevent lymphedema combined to intensify the suffering. Data analysis incorporated van Manen's (1990) six research activities which give human science its vigor. These non-sequential steps assisted in identifying five major themes: 1) Constancy; 2) Yearning for Normalcy; 3) Continually Searching; 4) Emotional Impact; and 5) Abandonment. The prevailing thread or essence salient to all five themes in this study is denoted as Existential Aloneness as each participant expressed a sense of isolation, of being on their own, of being set adrift to discover what they could about lymphedema, in the best way that they could. Nursing implications and recommendations for change are highlighted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".