Résilience et qualité de vie chez les femmes âgées de 40 à 55 ans ayant subi une mastectomie

Abstract

Our study focuses on « Resilience and quality of life in mastectomised women aged 40 to 55 ». It is based on the observation that mastectomy has a psychic impacy on women belonging to the premenopausal/menopausal slice following breast removal. At this age, the syndrome of «new youth», the sudden appearance of breast cancer sounds like a condemnation and an obstacle to the evolution of these women generally cross women. Cancer is a topic that is widely discussed around the world. It causes psychological suffering, challenging those who suffer, to project themselves into the future. In particular, patients who have undergone a mastectomy have difficulty living in harmony with themselves. They try to rebuild themselves and rely on their own strengths, as well as external factors. Protective factors, in this case faith in God. One would expect, however, that achieving resilience would lead to a better quality of life. Quality of life being a broad concept, to better measure it, has been reduced to self-esteem. The research question is: « how do the psychic processes of resilience lead to a good self-esteem in the women undergoing mastectomy? ». We relied on make the following hypothesis: « resilience leads to a good self-esteem in the mastectomised women aged 40-55. » Our objective is to understand the contribution of resilience in the level of self-esteem among women who have undergone a mastectomy in their entire situation. The clinical method is the one we used to achieve our goals; more specifically, we used the case study. We collected the data from two participants that we selected via the method of selection by reasoned choice at the Yaoundé General Hospital. We used semi-structured interviews, Katharina Maehrlein’s resilience test, and Rosenberg’s self-esteem scale. It appears from the interpretation of the results that mastectomy leads to a great psychological suffering that reduces to a very low level the value that the patient carries this despite the mobilization of internal and external resources put in place.