"We're different and it's okay that we're different":Long-term breast cancer survivorship among African American women

Objectives: To describe experiences of African American (AA) women in disease-free breast cancer survival. Methods: Focus groups were used to find out the reality of the cancer experience for each of the women and their health and illness behaviors. Findings: The four over-arching themes identified were diagnosis-related issues, spiritual responses to the diagnosis, social support matters, and disparity in treatment/expectations with a diagnosis of breast cancer. Conclusions: Each woman told her story. These stories reflected the experience in its totality, and findings suggest the experiences of AA women may be divergent from those of Caucasian women. Using the AA tradition of storytelling, more research is needed to fully understand survivorship experiences.