October 26, 2004

For some people, Friday the 13th invokes superstitious thoughts and haunting images.

But for Karla Stuebing, Friday, Aug. 13, 2004 marked her liberation from a ritual of daily radiation treatments and weeks of chemotherapy. That was the day Stuebing, University of Houston visiting professor of psychology, became a breast cancer survivor.

Now, she is one of the women participating and helping as a statistician with a recently launched study by the Department of Psychology’s Health Psychology Research Group in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

The study investigates psychological issues faced by breast cancer survivors, according to Mary Naus, group director and a breast cancer survivor herself. The study consists of a comprehensive questionnaire covering such topics as coping strategies, spirituality, depression, anxiety, quality of life, optimism, self-esteem and the impact of breast cancer on children and marriage, Naus said.

“Every breast cancer survivor has her own story,” Naus said. “Our goal is to design and implement research that quantifies these individual stories and combines them across many different survivors to establish patterns that will help others to more successfully cope with diagnosis, treatment and to live as a breast cancer survivor.”

All breast cancer survivors, regardless of age, stage of disease and time of diagnosis, may participate in the study. The research group hopes to recruit 150 black women, 150 white women, 150 Hispanic women who are survivors. Middle-aged and older women who have not encountered any life-threatening illnesses also are needed for a control group.

The research group is making a concerted effort to engage African American and Hispanic women because of a lack of adequate information on these survivors.

“We are committed to ensuring that we hear the stories of all women in our community,” Naus said.

Stuebing’s story began last year on Sept. 21 when she discovered a lump under her arm.

“I thought — oh, this is nothing,” Stuebing recalled. “It’s not on my breast. It’s under my arm, but I have two daughters. I really want to be a good role model for them— to let them know that you don’t fool around when you have a question about something like this. You go immediately to the doctor.”

On Oct. 8, Stuebing underwent a biopsy. On Oct. 13, at age 52, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, a disease that strikes 180,000 women in the United States annually, according to Naus.

In Harris County, 1,500 women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, she said. Naus added that about 44,000 women nationwide and 400 women in Harris County die from the disease annually.

Stuebing’s doctors told her nearly 10 months after diagnoses and treatment that her initial chance of survival for five years was 25 percent.

“At first, I didn’t want to know what my odds were, even though I am a statistician, so my doctors gave me those numbers much later,” she said. “Group odds mean nothing to me as an individual. I decided that I had to do everything I could to survive.”

After the initial shock, Stuebing confided in some of her UH colleagues, including Naus, who suggested that she devise a plan to cope with the cancer, physically and psychologically.

Stuebing and Brad, her husband of 29 years, decided that she should undergo surgery as soon as possible.

“My doctors took out a great big tumor that did not show up on a mammogram nine months earlier,” she said. “They took out 19 lymph nodes, and 16 of them had cancer.”

On Nov. 14, Stuebing started seven months of chemotherapy and followed by nearly seven weeks of daily radiation treatments.

Her husband, 17-year-old and 24-year-old daughters, friends and colleagues helped her through the 11-month ordeal, especially when she lost her hair, toenails, fingernails and eyebrows. Stuebing also noted that working at UH eased her stress.

Then on Friday, Aug. 13, 2004, she rang the bell at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

“It was a giddy day,” Stuebing said, remembering her last radiation treatment. “They take you to this place where there is a bell that you ring. I thought—I could ring the bell, that’s no problem, but there’s a poem near the bell. The poem says something like now that your treatment is over, you can live again. It was very emotional.”

Her husband, who took pictures of her ringing the bell, was just as moved, Stuebing said, adding that her odds of survival have greatly improved since her treatments.

Naus noted that, like Stuebing, “more and more people are living with cancer, but we know so little about the experience of it — emotionally, psychologically. I believe our study will stimulate other research on living with cancer.”

For more information on the Health Psychology Research Group, visit http://www.psychology.uh.edu/hprg/. To participate in the study, call 713-743-8449 or send an e-mail to HPRG@mail.uh.edu.

Francine Parker
fparker@central.uh.edu