Healing time: the experience of body and temporality when coping with illness and incapacity

Psychosocial well-being after stroke in Aotearoa New Zealand: a qualitative metasynthesis

PURPOSE

Psychosocial well-being is key to living well after stroke, but often significantly affected by stroke. Existing understandings consider well-being comes from positive mood, social relationships, self-identity and engagement in meaningful activities. However, these understandings are socioculturally located and not necessarily universally applicable. This qualitative metasynthesis examined how people experience well-being after a stroke in Aotearoa New Zealand.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

This metasynthesis was underpinned by He Awa Whiria (Braided Rivers), a model which prompts researchers to uniquely engage with Māori and non-Māori knowledges. A systematic search identified 18 articles exploring experiences of people with stroke in Aotearoa. Articles were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.

RESULTS

We constructed three themes which reflect experiences of well-being: connection within a constellation of relationships, being grounded in one's enduring and evolving identities, and being at-home in the present whilst (re)visioning the future.

CONCLUSION

Well-being is multi-faceted. In Aotearoa, it is inherently collective while also deeply personal. Well-being is collectively achieved through connections with self, others, community and culture, and embedded within personal and collective temporal worlds. These rich understandings of well-being can open up different considerations of how well-being is supported by and within stroke services.

The Long or the Post of It? Temporality, Suffering, and Uncertainty in Narratives Following COVID-19

Long COVID affects millions of individuals worldwide but remains poorly understood and contested. This article turns to accounts of patients' experiences to ask: What might narrative be doing both to long COVID and for those who live with the condition? What particular narrative strategies were present in 2020, as millions of people became ill, en masse, with a novel virus, which have prevailed three years after the first lockdowns? And what can this tell us about illness and narrative and about the importance of literary critical approaches to the topic in a digital, post-pandemic age? Through a close reading of journalist Lucy Adams's autobiographical accounts of long COVID, this article explores the interplay between individual illness narratives and the collective narrativizing (or making) of an illness. Our focus on temporality and suffering knits together the phenomenological and the social with the aim of opening up Adams's narrative and ascertaining a deeper understanding of what it means to live with the condition. Finally, we look to the stories currently circulating around long COVID and consider how illness narratives-and open, curious, patient-centered approaches to them-might shape medicine, patient involvement, and critical medical humanities research.

Critical physiotherapy: a ten-year retrospective

Critical physiotherapy has been a rapidly expanding field over the last decade and could now justifiably be called a professional sub-discipline. In this paper we define three different but somewhat interconnected critical positions that have emerged over the last decade that share a critique of physiotherapy's historical approach to health and illness, while also diverging in the possibilities for new forms of practice and thinking. These three positions broadly align with three distinctive philosophies: approaches that emphasize lived experience, social theory, and a range of philosophies increasingly referred to as the "posts". In this paper we discuss the origins of these approaches, exploring the ways they critique contemporary physiotherapy thinking and practice. We offer an overview of the key principles of each approach and, for each in turn, suggest readings from key authors. We conclude each section by discussing the limits of these various approaches, but also indicate ways in which they might inform future thinking and practice. We end the paper by arguing that the various approaches that now fall under the rubric of critical physiotherapy represent some of the most exciting and opportune ways we might (re)think the future for the physiotherapy profession and the physical therapies more generally.

Rupture, repetition, and new rhythms for pandemic times: Mass Observation, everyday life, and COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the significance of time to everyday life, as the routines, pace, and speed of social relations were widely reconfigured. This article uses rhythm as an object and tool of inquiry to make sense of spatio-temporal change. We analyse the Mass Observation (MO) directive we co-commissioned on 'COVID-19 and Time', where volunteer writers reflect on whether and how time was made, experienced, and imagined differently during the early stages of the pandemic in the UK. We draw on Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier's 'rhythmanalysis', taking up their theorisation of rhythm as linear and cyclical and their concepts of arrhythmia (discordant rhythms) and eurhythmia (harmonious rhythms). Our analysis highlights how MO writers articulate (a) the ruptures to their everyday rhythms across time and space, (b) their experience of 'blurred' or 'merged' time as everyday rhythms are dissolved and the pace of time is intensified or slowed, and (c) the remaking of rhythms through new practices or devices and attunements to nature. We show how rhythm enables a consideration of the spatio-temporal textures of everyday life, including their unevenness, variation, and difference. The article thus contributes to and expands recent scholarship on the social life of time, rhythm and rhythmanalysis, everyday life, and MO.

Erfüllte Gegenwart und Rhythmus des Lebens

Der Zusammenhang von Zeit und gutem Leben wurde bereits für eine Reihe medizinischer Disziplinen und Praktiken herausgearbeitet. Doch welche Rolle spielt die Zeitlichkeit des guten Lebens für die Medizin insgesamt? Das ist die leitende Frage dieses Artikels. Dabei wird das gute Leben als sinnvolles Leben verstanden. In diesem Sinne wird für eine zweifache medizinische Relevanz der Zeitlichkeit des guten Lebens argumentiert: Erstens besteht der Sinn medizinischer Behandlungen in der Ermöglichung erfüllter Gegenwart. Zweitens kann und sollte ebendies u. a. durch die Wahrung und Wiederherstellung der chronobiologischen Rhythmen geschehen.

Living in Rural Areas and Receiving Cancer Treatment Away From Home: A Qualitative Study Foregrounding Temporality

We used explorative interviews to gauge (inter)personal, physiological, and emotional challenges of seven rural cancer patients who traveled long distances to cancer treatment centers. After a thematic analysis, we foregrounded experiences of temporality by using a phenomenologically inspired approach. The analysis resulted in three themes: (a) An epiphany of “what really matters in life”—time gains new meaning, (b) Feeling out of sync with others and own body—striving for coherence and simultaneity, and (c) Being torn between benefits of home and treatments site—time and distance as a tangible aspect of traveling and being away. Under these themes, 13 meaning units were generated, which reflected changes in temporality. During treatment, life primarily revolved around repeating circles of travel arrangements, staying on top of treatment schedule, and synchronizing a home life with a life away from home. Nurses should provide comprehensive care to enhance stability in cancer patients’ temporal experiences.

A peculiar experience- everyday life with chronic sensory disturbances after oxaliplatin treatment for colorectal cancer - a phenomenological study

Purpose: To deepen the understanding of how survivors' experience and give meaning to the embodied phenomenon of chronic sensory disturbances in everyday life after oxaliplatin treatment for colorectal cancer.Methods: Data was generated by means of a semi-structured interview guide and drawings with the aim to explore eight survivors' lifeworld experiences. Data was analyzed through a phenomenological approach.Results: The essential meaning of sensory disturbances emerged in two main themes and four sub-themes. Theme A: 'A peculiar experience that is difficult to logically understand' with the subthemes; 'An ambiguous perception in hands and feet' and 'Being alienated from one's own body'. Theme B: Losing touch with the world' with the subthemes: 'A lack of sensory contact with physical surfaces' and 'Breakdown of sensitivity in hands hampers fine motor skills and social contact'.Conclusion: Sensory disturbances contributed to an ambiguous and discordant perception of an alienated body that was difficult to describe and affected the ability to act and connect to things and other people. Metaphors and drawings were valuable as means to verbalize and illustrate the changed body perception where the 'I can' changed into 'I cannot'. To support the embodied connection to the world new usage patterns were required.