Overcoming Potential Suffering: Interpreting the Diagnosis of Hereditary Ovarian and Breast Cancer at the Pauls Stradins Clinical University Hospital, Latvia

In this chapter attention is allocated towards portraying the ways in which women try to come to terms with an inherited illness that has or may affect them and their offspring over several generations. It has been established that certain gene mutations increase the chances of a person to develop certain kinds of cancers. Development of cancer is determined by certain genetic mutations that are inherited from generation to generation. Medical intervention before any symptoms appear in a patient based on genetic testing is a relatively new approach in medicine, one which hopes to conquer suffering associated with cancer before it even strikes. After being tested for genetic mutations associated with high risk of cancer, healthy individuals can undergo counselling, annual medical surveillance and preventative surgery or simply ignore the risk of future suffering from hereditary illnesses while being labelled as a metaphorical ‘ticking time bombs’. Possessing knowledge of genetic risk can have many interpretations and consequences for individual and family identity building around suffering. The topic of suffering is uncovered through the results of sociological in-depths interviews with women who have been diagnosed with breast and ovarian cancer hereditary genome mutation at the Pauls Stradins Clinical University hospital.