Teaching Through Trials: Living Forward with Breast Cancer in Academic Life

This scholarly personal narrative (SPN) examines my experience of navigating stage 3 breast cancer while continuing to teach, mentor, and write as a tenured university professor. Drawing on self-generated artifacts, including blog posts, podcast reflections, and creative writing, I analyze how I made meaning across treatment and survivorship. Guided by Lent’s (2004) model of psychosocial adjustment, the study explores how self-efficacy, coping practices, and social support shaped an ongoing process of adaptation. Findings suggest that adjustment is not a simple return to a prior state, but a dynamic practice of living forward, sustained through everyday acts of meaning-making, creative expression, and relational connection. The analysis shows how illness reshaped embodied identity, professional capacity, and understandings of self without erasing continuity or purpose. This work contributes to qualitative research by showing how SPN can illuminate the lived complexities of illness, identity reconstruction, and professional persistence within contemporary academic life and academic work.