There has been a great deal of qualitative research conducted that has examined the impact of breast cancer on the Self, however, there has been little effort to analyze these findings from a meta-perspective. This study sought to fill this gap by conducting a meta-synthesis of the qualitative research on breast cancer and its treatments affecting the Self. Meta-method and meta-synthesis techniques were used to integrate findings across 30 qualitative research reports conducted between 1990 and 2003 with a total of 795 women, from several different countries. The fusions identified from this meta-synthesis revealed 4 aspects of the Self affected by the diagnosis of breast cancer and its treatment: awareness of their own mortality, living with an uncertain certainty, attachment validation, and redefinition of Self. These findings were validated through use of a comparison study. The women adapt to being a breast cancer patient; redefining their lives and their self. This study highlights the existential process that women of many cultures move through as they incorporate the meaning of breast cancer into their lives. Nurses who are aware of these processes are better able to link women with resources to help them in their adaptation to living with breast cancer.

Women who lose an early pregnancy are shocked when they are first given the information that they have miscarried. Later they feel guilt and emptiness. Heideggerian interpretive phenomenology has been used with 13 women from southwest Sweden to uncover their lived experience of miscarriage. Women plan their future with a child during early pregnancy. When miscarriage occurs it is not a gore, an embryo, or a fetus they lose, it is their child. They feel that they are the cause of the miscarriage through something they have done, eaten, or thought. They feel abandonment and they grieve for their profound loss; they are actually in bereavement.