Trouble importing text from a .docx file

[snippsat]

As mention you do not do anything with those Unicode strings.
All string method work the same with Unicode string and using print the u wont be there.

>>> lst = [u'This', u'is', u'a', u'doc', u'file']
>>> for item in lst:
...     print(item)
...     
This
is
a
doc
file

>>> lst[0].upper()
u'THIS'
>>> # print and u is gone
>>> print(lst[0].upper())
THIS

You should be using python 3,there as mention is all string Unicode.
Unicode was one biggest changes in Python 3.