Judith A. Shell, PhD, LMFT, RN

The patient, KC, is a 41-year-old Caucasian female. She has been married to SC for 16 years and has three children, aged 14, 11, and 9 years old. She has always been a homemaker with plenty of energy and says that she has been “the rock” during any crisis. KC was diagnosed with T2N1M0 poorly differentiated invasive ductal carcinoma of the breast with lobular features in 2007. She decided to have a mastectomy without immediate reconstruction because she did not know if reconstruction was what she wanted. She has also undergone four courses of chemotherapy (doxorubicin [Adriamycin] and paclitaxel [Taxol]) followed by radiation therapy.