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 st...

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, c...

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 Je...

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 sitti...

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...

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 fe...

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....

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 h...

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 convers...

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 a...

What happens when your body suddenly decides to stop making the exact hormone that keeps you alive? Meet Sarah, a badass who trains in Muay Thai, manages ADHD and C-PTSD, and spent months wondering why climbing a single flight of stairs felt like summiting Everest. Before a life-threatening crash landed her in the hospital with a cortisol level of "less than one," Sarah was taking straight sh...

How do you convince the CRA that bulk silicone nipples are a legitimate business expense? This week, the fellas sit down with Miranda, affectionately known as "the boob lady”, an artist and advocate crafting hyper-realistic silicone prosthetic nipples and body casts for cancer survivors, trans folks, and anyone navigating post-surgery body trauma. Miranda opens up about her wild path to this work:...

What happens when a deep-seated thirst for childhood revenge turns into a career in genetic engineering? You get an absolute badass who is plotting the ultimate downfall of the world's deadliest killer. Krystal is a Ugandan entomologist (aka a massive bug nerd) who has dedicated her life to taking down the mosquito. Growing up in Uganda, surviving malaria was basically a terrifying game of Russian...

What happens when the doctor treating you is a cold, calculating AI trained on the deepest, darkest, most biased corners of the internet? This week, the boys sit down with Dr. Justin C. Key, a real-life psychiatrist and horror author who is literally writing the book on our medical doom. His new sci-fi thriller, The Hospital at the End of the World, explores the terrifying intersection of art...

What happens when your internal monologue switches from a storybook narrator to a demonic bully at age 12? Live from downtown Halifax, the guys sit down with Melly, a student association president who perfectly masked severe ADHD until a shocking diagnosis at age 43. Before finding out how her brain actually worked, Melly spent her 20s and 30s chasing dangerous dopamine hits just to make that...

What would you do if you moved out to LA at 18 to chase your dreams, but got handed a non-Hodgkin's lymphoma diagnosis and a 5-year expiration date instead? Our guest Aria fought through chemo, radiation, and 16 separate surgeries, and actually beat it. But the universe wasn’t done with her. After just two months of remission, the cancer moved to the temporal lobe of her brain, and doctors gave he...

This week on Sickboy we bring you the first episode of the latest season of Breathless. We're proud as heck with how this panned out and feel like you will dig it! The Season 2 premiere of Breathless explores a biological and existential revolution. For decades, Cystic Fibrosis was defined by a "physical perimeter"—a list of things that were simply impossible. But with the advent of transformative...

What if you could turn off the most agonizing pain imaginable just by thinking about a waterfall? Or better yet, what if a guy in a purple silk robe could cure you by waving a magnet over your junk? This week, Jeremie takes Brian and Taylor on a wild, mind-bending trip into the billion-dollar industry of Hypnobirthing and the dark, bizarre history of hypnosis. From 18th-century "Animal Magnetism"...

What do you do when a life-saving medical breakthrough saves almost everyone in your chronic illness community—except you? If you’re new to the show, Cystic Fibrosis is traditionally known as a genetic disease that heavily impacts the lungs. But this week, the fellas sit down with Nicholas Kelly, a registered dietitian who playfully calls himself a "unicorn" because he’s a Black man living with a...

What do you do when your own immune system decides to treat your organs like an all-you-can-eat buffet and drops eight separate medical diagnoses on your lap? This week, the brilliant and unapologetically defiant Jennifer Park joins the fellas to tier-rank her massive collection of interlocking illnesses. From competitive pro bodybuilding while navigating liver cirrhosis, to sneaking a giant woode...

What happens when the person keeping you alive is also the person roasting your life choices the hardest? If you’re new to the show, Brock is our brilliant, hilarious resident intern who navigates life with Cerebral Palsy. But this week, we’re turning the spotlight on the real hero of his life. His long-term care worker (and for sure NOT his wife) Katherine, joins the fellas to talk about the chao...

What happens when your brain is a literal ticking time bomb and nobody tells you until it goes off? Meet Martin. At 16, he was just a normal kid until a rare brain malformation (AVM) ruptured, sending him into a month-long coma where he "tripped balls" to a Lil Wayne soundtrack provided by the ICU staff. But the rupture was only the beginning. After a grueling months long recovery he got hit with...

What happens when you think you have a stubborn UTI, but you’ve actually fractured your pubic bone from running too many damn marathons? This week, the fellas sit down with Genevieve, a distance runner who woke up one morning feeling like she’d been kicked in the box. Literally. After two months of a particularly painful "detective" mission It turns out she has Osteitis Pubis. A stress fracture in...

What does a Super Bowl champion know about a virus most men think is "just a women's problem"? Laurent Duvernay-Tardif has spent his life protecting quarterbacks, but now he’s on a mission to protect your health. In this episode, the NFL star and medical resident joins the boys to strip away the stigma surrounding HPV. We dive into the startling reality that 75% of sexually active Canadians will c...

What do you do when you’re born with a brain-body communication glitch?. If you’re Dr. Dan, you don't just "manage". You go out and collect a PhD, a Paralympic gold medal in table tennis, and a career as a dating coach just to keep things interesting. This week, the fellas sit down with the legendary Dr. Dan to talk about life with Spastic Quadriplegic Cerebral Palsy. Dan gets real about the "Supe...