Sarah-Jane, LGBTQ+ gynae stories (6 June 2024).

Cheadle, Greater Manchester: 6 June 2024.

1 photograph: colour print ; 42 x 59.4 cm + accompanying text.

Sarah-Jane (She/Her) describes herself as a 47-year-old unapologetically queer, fat woman from Manchester. "In October 2019 after suffering for more than two years with abdominal pain, fatigue, bloating, sickness, changes to my bowel habits, irregular bleeding, an inability to eat more than a couple of mouthfuls of food, shortness of breath and unexplained weight loss a doctor finally listened. It took a doctor that was fat like me to hear me, she was the first doctor in two years to physically examine me and as soon as she did, she could feel my tumour... I was 42 and had every symptom of womb and ovarian cancer. I’d been to my GP for help more times than I can remember with every one of the symptoms; my unexplained weight loss was celebrated, my shortness of breath they said was because I ‘was unfit’, my inability to eat wasn’t believed. I wasn’t ever physically examined, offered a blood test, or referral by any of the Doctors I saw, each time I was sent away with pain and anti-sickness medications and told that the issue was my fat body - not the 4kg cancerous tumour growing and advancing inside me, limiting my life… Since my diagnosis I chose to share my lived experience with healthcare professionals and medical students… about the devastating impact medical weight stigma has had on my life; how unhelpful heteronormative assumptions about my sexuality made by the people treating me left me feeling invisible... I was never fully informed about the surgery I had consented to… nobody explained how a surgery that removed the whole of my reproductive system causing a surgical menopause would change how I feel and experience sex and intimacy with a body changed by cancer treatment.… Medical weight stigma allowed my cancer to grow unchecked, many others are medically gaslit and told that we don’t know what’s happening to our bodies or the pain we are experiencing is considered ‘normal’ for people with gynaecological organs leaving our symptoms to go unheard, untested and untreated until it’s too late.” --Sarah-Jane.

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Title provided by the artist.

The photograph is accompanied by a text written for the project web site.

Wellcome Collection 3362429i

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