Michael Kramer was 19 when cancer ambushed his life. He went from surfing Florida beaches to chemo, radiation, and a bone marrow transplant that left him alive but carrying a chronic disease. He had necrosis in his knees and elbows, lost his ability to surf for years, and found himself stuck in hospitals instead of the ocean. Yet he adapted. Michael picked up a guitar, built Lego sets, led support groups, and started sharing his story on Instagram and TikTok.

We talk about masculinity, identity, and what happens when the thing that defines you gets stripped away. He opens up about dating in Miami, freezing sperm at a children’s hospital, awkward Uber-for-sperm moments with his brother, and how meditation became survival. Michael lost his father to cancer when he was a teen, and that grief shaped how he lives and advocates today. He is funny, grounded, and honest about the realities of survivorship in your twenties. This episode shows what resilience looks like when you refuse to walk it off and choose to speak it out loud instead.

RELATED LINKS

• Michael Kramer on Instagram
• Michael Kramer on TikTok
• Michael and Mom Inspire on YouTube
• Ashlee Cramer's Book
• University of Miami Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center
• Stupid Cancer

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Daniel Garza had momentum. Acting roles, directing gigs, national tours lined up. Then anal cancer stopped everything. Radiation wrecked his body, stripped him of control, and left him in diapers, staring down despair. His partner, Christian Ramirez, carried him through the darkest nights, changed his wounds, fought hospitals, and paid the price with his own health. Christian still lives with permanent damage from caregiving, but he stayed anyway.

Together they talk with me about masculinity, sex, shame, friendship, and survival. They describe the friendships that vanished, the laughter that kept them alive, and the brutal reality of caregiving no one prepares you for. We get into survivor guilt, PTSD, and why even rocks need rocks. Daniel is now an actor, director, and comedian living with HIV. Christian continues to tell the unfiltered truth about what it takes to be a caregiver and stay whole. This episode gives voice to both sides of the cancer experience, the survivor and the one who stands guard.

RELATED LINKS

• Daniel Garza IMDb
• Daniel Garza on Instagram
• Daniel Garza on Facebook
• Christian Ramirez on LinkedIn
• Lilmesican Productions Inc (Daniel & Christian)
• Stupid Cancer

FEEDBACK

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Trevor Maxwell lived the archetype of masculinity in rural Maine. Big, strong, splitting wood, raising kids, and carrying the load. Then cancer ripped that script apart. In 2018 he was bedridden, emasculated, ashamed, and convinced his family would be better off without him. His wife refused to let him disappear. That moment forced Trevor to face his depression, get help, and rebuild himself. Out of that came Man Up To Cancer, now the largest community for men with cancer, a place where men stop pretending they are bulletproof and start being honest with each other.

Eric Charsky joins the conversation. A veteran with five cancers, forty-nine surgeries, and the scars to prove it, Eric lays out what happens when the military’s invincible mindset collides with mortality. Together, we talk masculinity, vulnerability, sex, shame, and survival. This episode is blunt, raw, and overdue.

RELATED LINKS

• Man Up To Cancer
• Trevor Maxwell on LinkedIn
• Dempsey Center
• Eric Charsky on LinkedIn
• Stupid Cancer

FEEDBACK

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The most anticipated annual tradition on Out of Patients returns with the 2025 Holiday Podcast Spectacular starring Matthew's twins Koby and Hannah. Now 15 and a half and deep into sophomore year, the twins deliver another unfiltered year end recap that longtime listeners wait for every December. What began as a novelty in 2018 has become a time capsule of adolescence, parenting, and how fast childhood burns off.

This year’s recap covers real moments from 2025 A subway ride home with a bloodied face after running full speed into that tree that grows in Brooklyn. Broadway obsessions fueled by James Madison High School's Roundabout Youth Ensemble access, including Chess, & Juliet, Good Night and Good Luck, and Pirates of Penzance holding court on Broadway. A Disneylanmd trip where the Millennium Falcon triggered a full system reboot. A New York Auto Show pilgrimage capped by a Bugatti sighting. All the things.

The twins talk school pressure, AP classes, learner permit anxiety, pop culture fixation, musical theater devotion, and the strange clarity that comes with turning 15. The humor stays sharp, the details stay specific, and the passage of time stays undefeated. 

This episode lands where the show works best: family, honesty, and letting young people speak for themselves.

FEEDBACK

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Jason Gilley walked into adulthood with a fastball, a college roster spot, and a head of curls that deserved its own agent. Cancer crashed that party and took him on a tour of chemo chairs, pediatric wards, metal taste, numb legs, PTSD, and the kind of late night panic that rewires a kid before he even knows who he is.

I sat with him in the studio and heard a story I know in my bones. He grew up fast. He learned how to stare down mortality at nineteen. He found anchors in baseball, therapy, and the strange friendships cancer hands you when it tears your plans apart. 

He owns the fear and the humor without slogans or shortcuts. Listeners will meet a young man who refuses to let cancer shrink his world. He fights for the life he wants. He names the truth without apology. He reminds us that survivorship stays messy and sacred at the same time. 

This conversation will stay with you.

RELATED LINKS

• Jason Gilley on IG

• Athletek Baseball Podcast

• EMDR information

• Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta

FEEDBACK

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Dr. Marissa Russo trained to become a cancer biologist. She spent four years studying one of the deadliest brain tumors in adults and built her entire research career around a simple, urgent goal: open her own lab and improve the odds for patients with almost no shot at survival. In 2024 she applied for an F31 diversity grant through the NIH. The reviewers liked her work. Her resubmission was strong. Then the grant system started glitching. Dates vanished. Study sections disappeared. Emails went silent. When she finally reached a program officer, the message was clear: scrub the DEI language, withdraw, and resubmit. She rewrote the application in ten days. It failed. She had to start over. Again. This time with her identity erased.

Marissa left the lab. She found new purpose as a science communicator, working at STAT News through the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship. Her story captures what happens when talent collides with institutional sabotage. Not every scientist gets to choose a Plan B. She made hers count.

RELATED LINKS

Marissa Russo at STAT News

NIH F31 grant story in STAT

AAAS Mass Media Fellowship

Contact Marissa Russo

FEEDBACK

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Scott Capozza and I could have been cloned in a bad lab experiment. Both diagnosed with cancer in our early twenties. Both raised on dial-up and mixtapes. Both now boy-girl twin dads with speech-therapist wives and a lifelong grudge against insurance companies. Scott is the first and only full-time oncology physical therapist at Yale New Haven Health, which means if he catches a cold, cancer rehab in Connecticut flatlines. He’s part of a small, stubborn tribe of providers who believe movement belongs in cancer care, not just after it. We talked about sperm banking in the nineties, marathon training during chemo, and what it means to be told you’re “otherwise healthy” when your lungs, ears, and fertility disagree. Scott’s proof that survivorship is not a finish line. It’s an endurance event with no medals, just perspective.

RELATED LINKS

• Scott Capozza on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-capozza-a68873257
• Yale New Haven Health: https://www.ynhh.org
• Exercising Through Cancer: https://www.exercisingthroughcancer.com/team/scott-capozza-pt-mspt
• Profiles in Survivorship – Yale Medicine: https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/profiles-in-survivorship-scott-capozza

FEEDBACK

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Dr. MaryAnn Wilbur trained her whole life to care for patients, then left medicine behind when it became a machine that punished empathy and rewarded throughput. She didn’t burn out. She got out. A gynecologic oncologist, public health researcher, and no-bullshit single mom, MaryAnn walked straight off the cliff her career breadcrumbed her to—and lived to write the book.

In this episode, we talk about what happens when doctors are forced to choose between their ethics and their employment, why medicine now operates like a low-resource war zone, and how the system breaks the very people it claims to elevate. We cover moral injury, medical gaslighting, and why she refused to lie on surgical charts just to boost hospital revenue.

Her escape plan? Tell the truth, organize the exodus, and build something that actually works. If you've ever wondered why your doctor disappeared, this is your answer. If you're a clinician hiding your own suffering, this is your permission slip.

RELATED LINKS

• MaryAnn Wilbur on LinkedIn
• Medicine Forward
• Clinician Burnout Foundation
• The Doctor Is No Longer In (Book)
• Suck It Up, Buttercup (Documentary)

FEEDBACK

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Episode 5 of Standard Deviation with Oliver Bogler on the Out of Patients podcast feed pulls you straight into the story of Dr Ethan Moitra, a psychologist who fights for LGBTQ mental health while the system throws every obstacle it can find at him.

Ethan built a study that tracked how COVID 19 tore through an already vulnerable community. He secured an NIH grant. He built a team. He reached 180 participants. Then he opened an email on a Saturday and learned that Washington had erased his work with one sentence about taxpayer priorities. The funding vanished. The timeline collapsed. His team scattered. Participants who trusted him sat in limbo.

A federal court eventually forced the government to reinstate the grant, but the damage stayed baked into the process. Ethan had to push through months of paperwork while his university kept the original deadline as if the shutdown had not happened. The system handed him a win that felt like a warning.

I brought Ethan on because his story shows how politics reaches into science and punishes the people who serve communities already carrying too much trauma. His honesty lands hard because he names the fear now spreading across academia and how young scientists question whether they can afford to care about the wrong population.

You will hear what this ordeal did to him, what it cost his team, and why he refuses to walk away.

RELATED LINKS

Faculty Page

NIH Grant Details

Scientific Presentation

Boston Globe Coverage

FEEDBACK

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Chelsea J. Smith walks into a studio and suddenly I feel like a smurf. She’s six-foot-three of sharp humor, dancer’s poise, and radioactive charm. A working actor and thyroid cancer survivor, Chelsea is the kind of guest who laughs while dropping truth bombs about what it means to be told you’re “lucky” to have the “good cancer.” We talk about turning trauma into art, how Shakespeare saved her sanity during the pandemic, and why bartending might be the best acting class money can’t buy. She drops the polite bullshit, dismantles survivor guilt with punchline precision, and reminds every listener that grace and rage can live in the same body. If you’ve ever been told to “walk it off” while your body betrayed you, this one hits close.

RELATED LINKS

• Chelsea J. Smith Website

• Chelsea on Instagram

• Chelsea on Backstage

• Chelsea on YouTube

• Cancer Hope Network

• Artichokes and Grace – Book by Chelsea’s mother

FEEDBACK

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.