Patient Interview Paper

When faced with an illness, no matter how serious, the beliefs of the patient are important to their experiences of that illness and the process of healing. This interview was conducted with a young woman and her experience of having leukemia when she was a teenager. The information gathered expressed her beliefs around her illness and her points of view on the experiences, which is then telling in general how beliefs are important in broader human experiences of illness.
I interviewed Maia Pedemonte, a 29 year old female from Santa Cruz, California, on October 26th, 2017. She was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) when she was 19 years old. At the time, she was in her freshman year of college in Los Angeles. She first noticed that

This is part of Kleinman’s explanatory model for trying to understand what someone believes about a disease and includes these questions that doctors can ask patients so they can come to a consensus on treatments (Killmer 9/11/17). Several of these questions were used in this interview, including her beliefs about the causes of her problem, why it started when it did, how severe it was to her, what the most important results were for her, and what she feared most about it. From these questions, she very strongly believed in a cause of this illness and associated it with her environmental surroundings. She was mostly fearful on impacts this illness might have on her future, and during this illness, she was most focused on following her treatment and the doctor’s instructions so she could get past it. These beliefs and approaches to her illness are telling of our broader American society in that we tend to put a lot of trust in biomedicine and the technology that we have to heal and treat that we do not often consider death, or any negative outcomes, as an option. It also shows something about our point of view on time, and how we tend to live fast-paced lifestyles, always wanting to move on to the next thing and be able to get back to our “normal lives”, which was seen here with this interview, especially in her actions taken throughout her illness to try to live a normal life, such as take classes during treatments. In the interview, her beliefs around her illness, still to this day, were very much impacted by the fact that it could have had a potential effect on part of her future identity, from her point of view, as a mother. This not only pushed her to want to get past it more, but it still brings up emotions knowing it could have gone the other way. The beliefs people have around how illness either becomes a part