Episodes

My dad’s birthday is coming up, and I’m remembering the humor, presence, and ordinary pleasures of the father I lost when I was thirteen. He lived with Type 1 diabetes and heart disease, and after twenty years with sarcoidosis and my own experience of heart failure, I understand parts of his life differently. From an airport breakfast to a midnight disco, these memories bring me closer to the father I miss and the grown man I wish he’d had time to know. This podcast is narrated using an AI voic...

Living with chronic illness brings financial costs beyond copays and prescriptions. I spend hours untangling insurance denials, prior authorizations, confusing bills, and paperwork nobody counts as work. In this episode, I talk about the energy lost to phone calls, the anxiety of not knowing what I owe, and the frustration of having complex medical care reduced to codes on a page. I also explain why I believe specialized medical decisions deserve reviewers who understand the conditions involved....

After my metoprolol dose increased to 200 mg, my wife and I began noticing troubling short-term memory problems. I was forgetting conversations and searching for things I had placed somewhere only moments earlier. In this episode, I share what those medication side effects looked like in ordinary daily life, why they frightened me, and what happened after I called my cardiologist and changed medications. This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience ar...

Living with chronic illness changes what an ordinary to-do list means. My iPhone reminders might show a phone call, an errand, or a message, while leaving out the fatigue, brain fog, symptoms, recovery time, and decisions surrounding each task. In this episode, I look at chronic illness and productivity through the unfinished reminders waiting on my phone, and why a list never tells the whole story of what I did with my day. This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, an...

I canceled my lung transplant evaluation after months of research, prayer, and conversations with my wife, but I still want active medical care. Living with sarcoidosis and heart failure has made treatment decisions deeply personal, especially when recovery would ask so much of both of us. In this episode, I share why I declined the evaluation, my fear of being misunderstood by my doctors, and the care I still want as I look toward my future. This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The word...

In this episode of A Body Re-bells: A Chronic Illness Podcast, I respond to a listener living with pulmonary sarcoidosis, depression, family estrangement, and the loss of friendships after diagnosis. I talk about what friendship looks like when illness stops being temporary, why suicidal thoughts deserve immediate professional support, and what happened when one of my own friendships ended after I revealed how sick I was. I also share what twenty years with sarcoidosis taught me about accepting ...

On A Body Re-bells: A Chronic Illness Podcast, I tell the story of an injured mouse and Prince, my strong old cat who refused to look old. Prince was already in his late teens when our strange nighttime rescue unfolded. He later lived to twenty-one, staying strong through his final day. His goodbye changed how I remember the mouse and how I think about my own life. After twenty years with sarcoidosis, I find myself thinking less about looking brave and more about staying myself, remaining indepe...

I’ve spent much of my life becoming good at things, from school to culinary training to massage work, yet skill never answered a harder question for me: what do I love for myself? Chronic illness filled so much of my time with appointments, symptoms, tests, refills, and research, I lost touch with parts of myself unrelated to survival. In this episode, I look back at old interests, childhood dreams, and music, then explain why learning piano now feels less like another goal and more like finding...

In my one hundredth episode, I end up in the emergency room after seeing blood in my urine during Labor Day weekend. I walk through the way I handled the night, from researching possible causes to arriving with twenty years of medical history ready on my phone. Somewhere between the CT scan and my medication list, I recognize a familiar pattern. Chronic illness taught me to prepare, anticipate problems, and reduce uncertainty. Those habits serve me well in medicine. I’m starting to see what happ...

My health has reached a point where pushing through no longer works. In this short episode, I explain why I’m ending Season Four early and taking the rest of September away from the podcast. I need my limited energy for treatment, appointments, symptoms, and the work of getting through each day. I also need space to experience this difficult period without turning every part of it into something productive. I’ll return at the end of September to begin Season Five with more stories from life insi...