As we have stated elsewhere on this website, the aims of the Gynae Narratives Project are:

• to increase understanding of how radiotherapy impacts on the sense of sexual self and on social and personal lives, and
• to improve patient experiences of living with the social and personal impacts of radiotherapy.

We do this with a very strong commitment to the philosophies of feminist studies of science and technology, and feminist understandings of health. This means that we wish to develop our understanding of health through examining women’s social roles and lived experience, considering how outcomes for women and other marginalised groups, and their experiences of health care, are shaped by societal, political and economic influences.

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Writing a blog post on the ‘new normal’, in the middle of the pandemic, when the phrase has been used ad nauseum across the news and social media – it may have you rolling your eyes. Although the phrase has been thrust into our pandemic vocabulary relatively recently, the term the ‘new normal’ has been around for a little while in the world of cancer.  For anyone who has listened to the podcast You, Me and the Big C, the ‘new normal’ may well have a familiar ring to it, and is such a well-known trope that it features as the topic of an episode for the podcast. Within this episode the presenters discuss the vast remit of the new normal, taken to refer to any (of the many) changes to life after diagnosis.

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In the previous blog post, we discussed how the language of ‘side’ effects is part of structuring the illness experience for patients. While biomedicine tends to separate effects into ‘therapeutic’ effects – characterised as lasting, if not permanent – and ‘side’ effects – characterised as temporary and reversible – the reality of ‘side’ effects is much messier. Not only because a ‘side’ effect for one drug, for example, may become the ‘therapeutic’ effect for another or that a temporary ‘side’ effect may become a permanent condition. More so, in this blog post, I focus on ‘side’ effects as being more than a relation to a ‘primary’ effect, and instead explore the argument that ‘side’ effects are relational in a variety of ways, for example, they can be personal, social or cultural, and even political too. In the following, I discuss ‘side’ effects as personal and political. Continue reading →

If we look up the phrase ‘side effect’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (2016), we are presented with two definitions:

1. ‘A secondary, unintended, and typically undesirable effect of an action, situation, etc.’.
2. ‘Medicine. An effect (usually for the worse) of a drug or treatment other than that for which it is administered’.

Side effects present themselves in different ways. Side effects from radiotherapy treatment may include sore skin, tiredness, hair loss, feeling sick, problems eating or drinking, diarrhoea, stiff joints and muscles, sex and fertility issues, emotional issues, and lymphoedema, amongst others (NHS 2017). For many patients, however, some or all side effects are not experienced as ‘secondary to’ or ‘other than’, as the dictionary definitions suggest. In the previous blog post on living with lymphedema, guest blogger Corinne Singleton provides an insightful account of how ‘side’ effects can be anything, but ‘secondary’. Continue reading →

Over the next few weeks, we will be blogging about cancer and ‘side’ effects.

We kick off the three-part blog series with a post written by Corinne Singleton, who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2016. She shares her story of living with lymphoedema.

In the next blog post, we discuss the language of ‘side’ effects and how it structures the illness experience for many patients, and in the final post, we focus on ‘side’ effects as being more than a relation to a ‘primary’ effect, and instead explore the argument that ‘side’ effects are relational in a variety of ways. Continue reading →