This week, Tara and Nicole dig into the psychology of stalking — starting with the Hulu docuseries Stalking Samantha: 13 Years of Terror, which follows a woman held captive in a soundproof box by the man who pursued her for more than a decadebefore she found a way to escape and had to decide whether to pursue lesser charges or fight for full justice against her captor. They trace the same fixation across pop culture — Netflix's Baby Reindeer, the 2007 documentary Crazy Love, Netflix's You, and the 2025 film Obsession — before pulling back to the clinical picture: what stalking actually looks like, how often it happens, and why it's so often minimized. On the medical side, they break down the CDC's data on stalking as a public health issue, including how common covert surveillance tactics like tracking and monitoring really are, and the mental health toll on survivors — PTSD, hopelessness, anxiety. They also revisit the 1989 murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer, whose case helped create the first U.S. anti-stalking laws, and close with the real story behind Baby Reindeer as told by creator Richard Gadd. Cocktail this week: The Celery Stalker. hulu

Sources & further reading:

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and this week on Medical Media Mixer, Tara and Nicole are raising a glass — and raising awareness — with a deep dive into one of the most extraordinary stories in modern medicine. Anchored to physician assistant, astronaut, and osteosarcoma survivor Hayley Arceneaux's memoir Wild Ride: A Memoir of I.V. Drips and Rocket Ships, this episode covers Hayley's diagnosis at age 10, the year of chemotherapy and bone-replacement surgery that followed, and the life-changing decision she made from her hospital bed at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital: to come back someday and take care of kids like her. She kept that promise, became a PA at St. Jude, and then — in January 2021 — got a call that would take her further than she ever imagined. This week, Tara and Nicole unpack the data behind childhood cancer, break down osteosarcoma from a clinical perspective, and explore what it means to survive, to thrive, and to orbit the Earth at 357 miles up with a metal rod in your leg. And yes — there's a cocktail.

THE BOOK

Wild Ride: A Memoir of I.V. Drips and Rocket Ships — Hayley Arceneaux (Convergent Books, 2022)

Wild Ride Adapted for Young Readers (2023)

Astronaut Hayley's Brave Adventure — Picture Book (2025)

THE DOCUMENTARY

Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space — Netflix (2021)

HAYLEY ARCENEAUX

hayleyarceneaux.com

@hayleyarc on Instagram

AAPA: Reaching New Heights — From Cancer Survivor to the First PA in Space (2021)

St. Jude: Women Who Inspire — Hayley Arceneaux

CHILDHOOD CANCER STATISTICS

Cancer Statistics, 2025. Siegel RL et al. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. 2025;75(1):10-45.

Global Burden of Cancer in Children and Adolescents, 1990–2023. GBD 2023 Childhood Cancer Collaborators. The Lancet. 2026;407(10536):1360-1373.

Trends in Childhood and Adolescent Cancer Incidence, 2001–2022. Shiels MS et al. Cancer Discovery. 2026;16(4):686-696.

SURVIVORSHIP & LATE EFFECTS

Clinical Care for People Who Survive Childhood Cancer: A Review. Bhatia S et al. JAMA. 2023;330(12):1175-1186.

Cardiovascular Toxicity in Patients Treated for Childhood Cancer. Ryan TD et al. Circulation. 2025;151(15):e926-e943.

Cancer Treatment and Survivorship Statistics, 2025. Wagle NS et al. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. 2025;75(4):308-340.

OSTEOSARCOMA

Osteosarcoma Survivor Story — Hayley Arceneaux (Osteosarcoma Institute)

NCCN Pediatric Soft Tissue Sarcoma Guidelines

SUPPORT & RESOURCES

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital — stjude.org

American Childhood Cancer Organization — acco.org

Children's Oncology Group — childrensoncologygroup.org

We're revisiting Episode 12 with fresh, urgent context: On Sept. 10, 2026, the CDC issued a Health Alert Network advisory warning of a nationwide increase in rabies exposures and post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) administration errors. Rabies vaccine use is up an estimated 33% year-over-year and rabies immunoglobulin use is up 76%, with at least eight state health departments reporting mistakes in how PEP is being given — including wrong injection sites and missed or unnecessary immunoglobulin doses. We also cover a real-world example of exactly this kind of mass-exposure event: In late August, North Carolina health officials confirmed rabies in four baby goats from Farm Adventures, a mobile petting zoo that visited 10 public events across six counties, including a back-to-school bash and an assisted living facility, before the exposure was caught.

Rabies is nearly 100% fatal once symptoms appear but fully preventable with timely, correctly administered PEP — which is why we're topping off this episode with what's changed.

Sources:

In 1964, a New York Times headline claimed 38 witnesses watched Kitty Genovese be stabbed to death in Kew Gardens, Queens, and did nothing — a story so shocking it launched decades of research into what psychologists now call the bystander effect. This week, Tara and Nicole dig into how much of that famous account was actually true. The 2015 documentary The Witness, directed by James Solomon and narrated by Kitty's brother Bill Genovese, dismantles the "38 witnesses" myth: there weren't 38 eyewitnesses, there were two attacks rather than three, at least one call to police was made during the assault, and a neighbor, Sophie Farrar, rushed to hold Kitty as she was dying. From there, the episode traces the real science Darley and Latané built off the (exaggerated) case — diffusion of responsibility, pluralistic ignorance, and why groups notice and react to emergencies more slowly than individuals do — plus how the effect shows up in later cases like the death of Wang Yue in China and ABC's What Would You Do? Along the way: Good Samaritan laws, what altruism research says actually predicts who helps, and why a story doesn't have to be fully accurate to change an entire field of psychology.

Sources & further reading:

This week, we're leaving the ER and heading upstairs — to the NICU. We're joined by Tara’s sister Kristin, doctorally prepared neonatal nurse practitioner, to break down ER Season 10, Episode 12 and Grey's Anatomy's NICU storylines, then get into the real clinical science behind what those shows depict. We cover congenital heart disease and coarctation of the aorta, extreme prematurity, hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy and therapeutic hypothermia, and what it actually looks like when a family decides to let go. The cocktail is The Tiny Fighter — gin, lemon, simple syrup, and bitters. Small but mighty, just like the patients.

Sources

This week we're diving into the unsettling world of parasomnias — sleep paralysis, night terrors, sleepwalking, sexsomnia, sleep eating, and sleep talking — using Inception and the 2015 documentary The Nightmare as our jumping-off point. We break down what's actually happening in the brain during these episodes, why sleep paralysis so often comes paired with terrifying hallucinations (hello, incubus and succubus folklore), and how conditions like exploding head syndrome, hypnic jerks, and nightmare disorder differ from garden-variety bad dreams. Pour yourself a Hypnagogic Highball and settle in — just maybe don't listen to this one right before bed.

Sources:

This week on Medical Media Mixer, we sit down with Paula Crichton De Alba, director of the 2024 short horror film The English Rose, to explore one of history’s most disturbing intersections: the toxic beauty rituals of Victorian women. From arsenic complexion wafers sold in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, to lead face paint that cracked if you smiled, to mercury eyelash treatments recommended in Harper’s Bazaar, to belladonna eye drops that caused blindness — Victorian women were literally dying for beauty. PA-C Tara Prisco breaks down the clinical toxicology of arsenic, lead, and mercury poisoning: epidemiology, symptoms, testing, and treatment. Dr. Nicole Peniston brings the psychological lens, exploring the harm loops, impossible beauty standards, and the question that anchors the whole episode: has anything really changed? Cocktail recipes drop every weekend on our socials. New episodes every Monday.

▶  Film & Filmmaker

▶  Historical & Cultural Sources

▶  Books

▶  Clinical & Medical Sources

This week we're unpacking Voyeur, the 2017 Netflix documentary in which journalist Gay Talese unmasks a motel owner who spied on his guests for decades — a bombshell story that becomes a scandal of its own. We use the film as our jumping-off point for a deeper dive into voyeuristic disorder: what separates ordinary curiosity from a diagnosable condition. As the Merck Manual lays out, voyeurism means becoming sexually aroused by watching an unsuspecting person who is disrobing, naked, or engaged in sexual activity, while voyeuristic disorder involves acting on those urges or fantasies, or being distressed or impaired by them — and critically, most people with voyeuristic tendencies never meet criteria for the disorder itself. We also touch on how the law has caught up (or hasn't) with covert filming, and take a quick detour into two related paraphilias, exhibitionism and frotteurism. Sources below. netflix + 2

Sources & further reading:

In this episode, we're shaking up The Tilt Table-Rita — a salty, passion-fruit margarita that doubles as a nod to one of the first-line treatments for our medical topic tonight — and diving into Netflix's buzzy new true crime documentary The Crash (2026). The film revisits the 2022 Strongsville, Ohio case in which 17-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla was convicted of murdering her boyfriend Dominic Russo and his friend Davion Flanagan after driving 100 mph into a brick building, with no evidence of braking. What made this case medically significant — and controversial — was the defense's claim that Shirilla blacked out due to POTS: Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. We break down the real science of POTS — who gets it, how it's diagnosed, the three pathophysiological subtypes, treatment options, and why so many patients are told for years that it's all in their heads. As always, we keep it clinical, honest, and just a little bit fun.

Sources:

This week we're chasing sunlight and shadow. We start with the Sunshine Daydream, a bright, citrus-forward vodka cocktail built for imagining yourself somewhere better even when you're stuck inside. From there we head somewhere much darker: Lars von Trier's Palme d'Or-winning musical tragedy Dancer in the Dark, where Björk's Selma escapes a life of poverty, failing eyesight, and looming disaster by slipping into elaborate musical daydreams. We use Selma as our jumping-off point to dig into the actual neuroscience of daydreaming, what's happening in the brain's default mode network, why daydreaming can boost creativity and problem-solving, and where the line sits between healthy mental escape and maladaptive daydreaming, a proposed clinical syndrome tied to compulsive, hours-long immersive fantasy that can disrupt work and relationships.

Sources referenced in this episode: