Sickboy

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...

What do high-performance fighter jets and a stage four cancer diagnosis have in common? More than you think. This week, we’re joined by Dr. Avishek “Avi” Kumar, a man who pulls double duty as both a practicing oncologist and a U.S. Air Force Flight Surgeon. Avi spends his time breaking the sound barrier in F-16s and fighting the "slow-motion car crash" of cancer diagnoses in young adults. We dive...

What happens when your body decides to Marie Kondo your entire large intestine, but the healthcare system treats your "vestibule" like an optional extra? This week we sit down with Emily. At 23, she went from a "healthy" young woman to shitting blood 20 times a day which eventually led to living life with a permanent Barbie butthole. But the real horror story isn't the Ulcerative Colitis diagnosis...

What do you do when your spine decides to "leak" before you're even born, leaving you with a "jizzy back rat" and a tube running from your brain to your belly? We’ve covered Spina Bifida before, but never quite like this. Meet Joshua, a man who has spent 48 years navigating the world from a wheelchair and dealing with an exposed spine. AKA Spina Bifida. The fellas get up close and personal with th...

What happens when you go from a senior spring break in Jamaica to poopin "gallons of blood" in the ER? Meet Taryn: 20 years old, a D1 volleyball player for the University of Northern Iowa, and a total boss living with Ulcerative Colitis (UC). After a senior trip to Jamaica turned into a month-long nightmare of abdominal pain, internal bleeding, and a very wrong E. coli diagnosis, Taryn had to face...

What happens when you’re born with a medical anomaly so rare that doctors treat you like a "cluster of defects," but you grow up feeling completely able-bodied? This week, the boys sit down with Kayla, who was born with unilateral anaphthalmia. Which is a fancy way of saying she was born without one of her eyes. But the "missing eye" is actually the least wild part of this story. Kayla takes us de...

It may have started with a joke about getting his "back blown out", but it turned into a wild story of a two-year medical saga involving brutal nerve pain, mobility issues, and a diagnosis nobody saw coming? Meet our new friend Ryan, a professional drummer who felt a literal "pop" in his back while he was sick and quickly realized his life was about to change. After months of being told it was jus...

What happens when the person paid to have all the answers suddenly gets hit with a medical mystery that turns their world entirely upside down? Vicki Jeha is a counseling therapist who spent years helping people navigate their own minds—until her own body decided to stage a coup. In 2023, mid-therapy session, Vicki’s vision started sliding, her limbs went numb, and she was carried out of her offic...

What happens when your paragliding wing folds in half 165 feet in the air, sending you on an 11-story plunge directly onto your ass? (Spoiler: You wake up and start a career in musical theater.) Most people’s worst nightmare involves falling out of the sky. For CJ, that nightmare became a violent reality. On a "big air" day in Pemberton, BC, CJ’s paragliding shute collapsed, and he fell 165 feet s...

What happens when your body is slowly losing its ability to breathe, but your brain is busy building the future of technology? This week, the fellas (and a very helpful Brock) sit down with Chouaieb (Cho), an AI Black Belt at Google who is quite literally using technology as a personal savior. Cho lives with Ulrich Congenital Muscular Dystrophy (UCMD), a rare condition that has left his diaphragm...

What do you do when your own tongue starts "shedding" like a snake and your doctor tells you to just "eat a banana"? Imagine waking up and seeing the world through 90s TV static, while your muscles literally stretch and tear like gum when you yawn. Làyla joins the boys to break down the reality of living with Refractory Myasthenia Gravis (MG), a version of the illness so stubborn it requires const...

What happens when your abdomen decides it's tired of the basement and wants to move into the penthouse suite? This week, we sit down with Jude, who was born with a rare birth defect called Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia (CDH). In plain English: they had a hole in their diaphragm (the dinner-plate-sized muscle that keeps your "upstairs" and "downstairs" separate) and their organs decided to throw...

What happens when a "Professional Knower" gets hit with a disease that has absolutely zero f*cking answers? Broadcasting legend and former CBC host Gill Deacon spent her life demanding answers for the public, but in 2022, her own body became the ultimate mystery. From her heart feeling like a "motorized toy" to wearing a wool toque 24/7 just to feel a semblance of warmth, Gill takes us through the...

Imagine being 21 years old, trapped in a two-week coma, completely unable to move or speak, while your sister leans over your bed and confesses her deepest darkest secret to you, and you hear the whole thing. This week, we sit down with Melanie, who at 21 years old, went from a "parking lot" migraine on the 401 to a life-saving brain surgery that left her in a two-week coma . But Melanie wasn't ju...