Sickboy

James started waking up with painful erections. Then it happened again and again up to five times a night. Pelvic floor therapy, sleep apnea treatment, medication, and prostate surgery failed to end the pain. With little sleep and few answers, James reached a frightening point in his mental health.

James joins the fellas to talk about the urologist who kept searching, the treatment that finally stopped his nighttime pain, and the tradeoffs that came with it. They also discuss sex after treatment, the support of James’s boyfriend, and Kuma, the teddy bear that helped him through his hardest nights. It’s a candid, funny, and deeply personal conversation about genital pain, shame, and finding room for joy again.

Have a story you want to share? Apply to be a guest at https://www.sickboypodcast.com.

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What happens when the drug that saves your life is still out of reach for thousands of people just like you?

Will Cathcart is a journalist, writer, war correspondent, and producer who worked on Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. He also lives with cystic fibrosis. Growing up believing his life would be cut short gave Will what he calls “Carpe Diem syndrome” - a drive that pulled him toward coups, conflict zones, and risks most people would run from. When his lungs began to fail, a groundbreaking CF modulator changed his future almost overnight. It also left him carrying survivor’s guilt for the friends who never got the same chance.

Now, Will is turning that second chance into action. He tells the fellas why he travelled to Bangladesh to publicly take a generic version of a CF drug priced at roughly $360,000 a year, how pharmaceutical patents can determine who gets to live, and why a medical miracle means very little when geography and money keep it out of reach.

The conversation also gets into parenthood, mortality, the strange burden of receiving a future you never planned for, and Will’s darkly funny novel, This Is How People Die.

Have a story you want to share? Apply to be a guest at https://www.sickboypodcast.com.

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After her first child was born, Andrea Patterson thought she was a bad mom. She was barely sleeping, overwhelmed by anxiety, and afraid to say some of her thoughts out loud. Connecting with other parents through peer support helped her understand what she was going through. Today, she supports families as a perinatal peer support counsellor with Pacific Post Partum Support Society.

Andrea joins Jeremie, Brian, and Taylor to talk about intrusive thoughts, the fear of asking for help, the toll of sleep deprivation, and what partners and loved ones can actually do. They also discuss the public reaction to the Lindsay Clancy case without speculating about anyone involved.

Content note: Content note: This episode discusses suicidal thoughts, intrusive thoughts, and the deaths of children. When Andrea shares her thoughts on when to get help, it is in relation to postpartum anxiety, depression, and difficult postpartum transitions. Postpartum psychosis is a very different thing and is a medical emergency and requires immediate intervention. If you or someone else is in crisis, seek help now. If there is immediate danger, call local emergency services. In Canada or the U.S., call or text 988 for 24/7 crisis support (Canada, U.S.). For non-emergency postpartum peer support, contact Pacific Post Partum Support Society.

https://postpartum.org/contact/

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Brian recently joined our friends at Artifacts of Grief to talk about the loss of Alex MacKenzie, his partner’s father, and the complicated experience of grieving someone while also trying to support the people you love through that same loss.

In the conversation, Brian talks about learning to make room for his own grief instead of trying to fix it, explain it, or make it go away. It’s about sitting with the uncomfortable stuff, allowing grief to be what it is, and the unexpected artifact that has helped him do exactly that.

This episode originally appeared on Artifacts of Grief, a podcast about the objects, rituals, and stories we hold onto after someone dies. We loved the conversation and wanted to share it here with the you guys.

Tune into more episodes of Artifacts of Grief wherever you listen to podcasts.

Welcome to Second Opinion — a new Sickboy series where Jeremie digs up wild medical stories, healthcare encounters and morally questionable health dilemmas, then Brian and Taylor give their completely unqualified opinions. This week: competitive suffering gets taken to an absurd new level, an OR team discovers a patient's eyeball has unexpectedly left the building, and a near-death confession puts an estranged wife and current girlfriend in an impossible position.

Sickboy has a NEW YouTube channel! You can catch this episode of Second Opinion and all future episodes of the series at: https://www.youtube.com/@SickboyPod

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Most people kick off their shoes to relax. For Laura, taking off her shoes drops her spine four centimeters and instantly throws her body out of alignment. This week, the fellas sit down with Laura to unpack Limb Length Discrepancy (LLD). At four years old, Laura was hit by a car, thrown 46 feet, and given a 1% chance of waking up from a medically induced coma. She beat the odds, but her broken femur overgrew during recovery, setting off a domino effect of unaligned hips, shifting ribs, and vertical eye-muscles. Laura gets raw and hilarious about using stacks of books to measure her own legs, getting custom shoe lifts cemented by German cobblers, turning her car accident PTSD into viral TikToks, and navigating the creepy foot-fetish guys cluttering her DMs. It’s an eye-opening conversation about body trauma, medical gaslighting, and finding balance when your foundation is literally uneven.

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What happens when a routine childhood cold turns your sweet eight-year-old into a full-blown horror movie scene overnight? Sickboy royalty Jessica Slice returns to the show for an intimate, terrifying, and wildly eye-opening conversation about the nightmare her family lived through when her daughter suddenly stopped walking, lost her speech, and entered a state of extreme, violent psychosis.

When ER doctors brushed off her daughter's sudden motor tics with a casual "kids are weird" and offered to throw an eight-year-old into an adult psych ward alongside an adult roommate, Jessica refused to take broken systems for an answer. Enter PANS (Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome) - a controversial, deeply misunderstood condition where a basic infection triggers an immune response that crosses the blood-brain barrier and sets off neuroinflammation in the brain.

From mysterious motor spasms to stealth trips across the border for IVIG treatment, Jessica gives us a raw, unfiltered look at relentless maternal advocacy, medical gaslighting, and the fight to save her daughter's mind.

For physician-vetted resources on PANS/PANDAS or to follow Jessica's writing and advocacy work, check out the links below:

https://www.pandasppn.org/

https://jessicaslice.com

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Jeremie was just looking into the history of performance-enhancing drugs when he accidentally stumbled into the absolute dumpster fire that was the 1904 St. Louis Olympic Marathon. What follows is arguably the most chaotic, medically irresponsible, and unhinged sporting event ever recorded. Between a racist organizer conducting forced dehydration experiments, clouds of dust causing internal hemorrhaging, a Cuban mailman who took a mid-race nap after eating rotten apples, and a guy who "won" gold after taking a cocktail of rat poison, raw egg whites, and French brandy - only 14 out of 32 runners made it to the finish line alive. Grab a drink (preferably water, not strychnine) and join Jeremie, Brian, and Taylor as they break down how human survival accidentally became an Olympic sport. 

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Surviving eight shots of Narcan at twelve years old is one hell of an introduction to chronic illness, and for Haylee, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Meet Haylee, a master’s student living with an absolute alphabet soup of diagnoses, including Cerebral Palsy, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), ARFID, AuDHD, OCD, and a recent addition of Bipolar disorder. In this raw and intimate conversation, Haylee breaks down what life is actually like when your body and brain are constantly clashing. From surviving a 26-hour leg surgery and an accidental morphine overdose at just twelve years old, to navigating the cold, isolating reality of transitioning out of pediatric care, Haylee doesn't hold back. She opens up about the trauma of medical PTSD, navigating safe-food obsessions, and using music and song-writing to quiet her brain during manic episodes. It’s an honest, eye-opening look at disability, identity, and proving everyone, including her doctors, wrong.

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Meet Judy. She’s a real estate agent who inadvertently became an extreme sports athlete in the deadly game of "Halifax Crosswalks". After getting smoked by a car going 80 km/h, Judy somehow survived the impact. But the real nightmare was just beginning. Enter Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), colloquially and terrifyingly known as the "suicide disease". Judy takes the boys through the sheer agony of a nervous system gone rogue, where even a slight touch felt like torture and sleep became a distant memory. Refusing to go down the opioid pipeline after watching her parents suffer from severe medication side effects, Judy and her husband embarked on a desperate, sleepless, 8-day drive to Florida to escape the cold. But this isn't just a chronic illness survival story. It’s a full-blown Hollywood thriller. We’re talking a blown-up rental car, a near-death experience in a Florida ER, and a spontaneous, miraculous recovery where her disease simply vanished into thin air. And if that wasn't wild enough? A prescribed medication sent her into a psychotic break that landed Judy in a Florida mental institution for six days, firmly convinced she had been downloaded with special powers from God to heal the other patients. Buckle up for one of the wildest rides in Sickboy history.

Check out Judys book here: https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000557751458/Judy-Isiah-Foran-My-Drive-Through-Hell

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