Feeling ill, not harmed: a phenomenological account of the long-term experience of false-positive breast cancer screening.

Scholarship has highlighted how the identification of breast cancer risk and false-positive screening results operate as modes of governance that shape subjects and extend the reach of medicine. Building upon this work, this article offers a phenomenologically-informed analysis of women's experiences of false-positive results in breast cancer screening, examining how such encounters with risk and the possibility of disease are lived and carried into everyday life. Based on ethnographic interviews with women who received false-positive results approximately 18 to 20 years previously, this study focuses on their narratives of receiving and living with a false-positive result over time. Drawing on narrative approaches and a focus on temporality, we analyse how women navigate the tensions of proximity to a potentially life-threatening disease through embodied experiences of risk, and how they seek to sustain meaningful lives in the wake of this uncertainty through narration. This study sheds light on the long-term impact of receiving false-positive screening results, demonstrating how such experiences can threaten notions of health while also generating appreciation and opportunities for personal and emotional growth. We suggest that the long-term accounts extend existing theoretical works on false-positive results, which has tended to emphasise the immediate emotional responses and shifts in risk perceptions as forms of biomedical harm. In contrast, these accounts enrich biomedical definitions of harm with experiential understandings of harm that feature both medicalised narratives, opportunities for reflection and personal growth, and ambiguous states of feeling ill but not feeling harmed.