CHANGED BY CANCER

What happens when an inherited piece of genetic code predicts the exact cancers that took your family members — not as an active diagnosis, but as a ticking probability map? In this episode of Changed By Cancer , Dr. Randi Paynter sits down with author Tiffany Graham Charkosky ( Living Proof: How Love Defied Genetic Legacy ). Tiffany has never had cancer, but her life has been shaped by it. After...

📋 Take the 60-Second Listener Survey Here: https://forms.gle/2zdkpujDFca7YhjUA A quick check-in and an exciting request for your input! After a stubborn back injury kept me away from the microphone last week, I am resting up off-camera and planning our next slate of standalone Epi Edit deep dives. These standalone episodes are our space to pull back the curtain on the science, population data, an...

When someone receives a cancer diagnosis, the impact is never confined to the individual patient. It sends an immediate shockwave through an entire family, transforming spouses, partners, parents, and children overnight into primary advocates, home clinicians, and logistical anchors. In this episode of Changed By Cancer, host Dr. Randi Paynter sits down with Charlotte Bayala, host of The Cancer Ca...

"So to me, the chemo was a healing experience. I felt good from it." — Marissa In Part One, Marissa described a decade-long path through progressive Multiple Sclerosis and an aggressive Stage III breast cancer diagnosis that arrived, paradoxically, as a second chance at life. In Part Two, host Dr. Randi Paynter continues the conversation as Marissa begins the chemotherapy regimen designed to treat...

"When I got diagnosed with breast cancer, all of a sudden I realized I could die. And then I felt terrible about how little I thought of my life and realized that I actually had a wonderful life... Being alive meant I could see my family, read a book, go outside. I could not believe how much I didn't see that I had all along." — Marissa In 2012, Marissa was a 42-year-old mother living in South Flo...

"Every day that I wake up and I don't have a new tumor, I'm adding to the survivorship data. So you have to live with a certain amount of uncertainty... I would like to curl up at night with a whole sheaf of data that doesn't exist yet, because I'm the one who's helping to create it." — Deborah When we evaluate health metrics on a macro scale, we often treat long-term oncology survivorship as a fi...

In April of 2013, Deborah was a busy mother of two young boys living in Brooklyn when a spot on her back came back positive for malignant melanoma. A sentinel lymph node biopsy was clear, but the pathology noted "melanoma in transit" — malignant cells already on their way to other parts of her body. By September of 2014, the "bad stuff" had landed in her lungs. Her oncologist recommended a clinica...

When we talk about cancer, we often talk about it in isolation — as a private medical crisis. But cancer doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens to people who live in specific communities, navigate specific systems, and face distinct structural realities. In this inaugural episode of The Epi Edit , host Dr. Randi Paynter steps behind the mic for a solo session to outline the mission of this new for...

When we are thrown into a health crisis, our brains desperately search for certainty through anchors, maps, timelines, and data. In the United States, the absolute gold standard for tracking population-level oncology data is a public health system called SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results) managed by the National Cancer Institute. In this episode of The Epi Edit , cancer epidemiolog...

Aiona came to California from Tonga when she was about a year old. She grew up in Sacramento, went on an LDS mission at twenty-one, came home, fell in love on what was essentially a second date, and eventually landed in Petaluma, CA — managing a Hampton Inn, raising two daughters, and working twelve-hour days until the day she noticed something had changed in her breast. That was November 2025. Th...

"The anxiety comes with the not knowing... When you know the end of the story, maybe that's when the anxiety goes away. I don't have as much anymore... I've jumped over every single hurdle. The last one is maybe going to be the hardest. But I'll do it and I'll finish the race." — Brenda The medical framework treats the conclusion of active oncology protocols—the chemo infusions, the surgical steps...

There is a version of this podcast that Dr. Randi Paynter imagined making before she started. She would sit across from strangers, ask them to trust her with the hardest thing that ever happened to them, and there would be a clean line between host and guest. This is not that episode. Brenda is Randi's sister. She is 52 years old. She works in human services — a career built on trying to do right...

Rachel is a two-time ovarian cancer survivor, an 18-year veteran of the cancer journey, and the author of The No-Bull**** Guide to Dealing with Cancer (written with co-author Dr. Mercedes Castiel). She was 32 years old when persistent, progressing symptoms led her to an OB-GYN, an ultrasound, a CAT scan, and — three days after her first appointment at Memorial Sloan Kettering — surgery for a rare...

Sasha's cancer was never supposed to be found when it was. Invasive lobular carcinoma — the second most common form of breast cancer — grows not in a lump, but in sheets and lines of cells. It only shows up on mammograms about thirty percent of the time. Sasha's first mammogram had come back clear. It was a chance ultrasound, performed alongside an unrelated finding, that caught a shadow no one wa...

Renee was 50 when her first mammogram came back with a diagnosis: ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). She had a lumpectomy, radiation, and got on with her life. Two years later, the DCIS was back — same breast, more aggressive, with a feature called comedonecrosis that changed the calculus entirely. This time, Renee came to her surgeon armed. Two years of research, Facebook groups, Reddit threads, an...

Podcast episodes are coming soon!