The Kristen Toepfer Podcast Stroke and Aphasia Advocate

You’ve heard Kristen’s story. Now hear from the man who lived it right beside her. In this special episode, Billy sits down with John Church — Kristen’s husband, high school sweetheart, and the person who has been her rock through every surgery, every setback, and every hard day of this recovery. John has been mentioned throughout this podcast since the very beginning. This is the first time he ge...

John Church is back, and this time we go even deeper. In Part 2 of his conversation with Billy, John picks up where he left off — moving from the raw chaos of the early days into the long, slow, unglamorous grind of years of caregiving. The part nobody puts on a highlight reel. The part that tests everything. John talks about learning to communicate with Kristen when she had no words — the progres...

The holidays are supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year. For stroke and aphasia survivors, they can also be the most exhausting, isolating, and emotionally complicated. In this episode, Kristen Toepfer gets completely honest about what the holidays actually look like when aphasia is at the table. Kristen takes us back to what the holidays were before September 11th, 2018 — gathering at...

There is a kind of grief that nobody talks about — the grief of losing yourself. Not to death, but to a single moment that splits your life into before and after. For Kristen Toepfer, that moment was September 11th, 2018. And the person she had to mourn was herself. In this deeply personal episode, Kristen takes us back to who she was before the stroke — a nightshift industrial engineer at UPS wit...

She recorded this episode the morning after having a seizure. That alone tells you everything you need to know about Kristen Toepfer. In Part 2 of Why My Brain is an A**hole, Kristen goes deep on seizures — what they actually are, what they feel like from the inside, and what it means to build an entire life around managing something that can show up without warning and take you out for minutes, h...

This is the episode most people wouldn’t have the courage to record. Kristen Toepfer has never been most people. In this raw and deeply personal episode, Kristen pulls back the curtain on something that doesn’t get talked about enough in the stroke recovery world — the mental health battle that can come after surviving a brain injury. For Kristen, that battle hit hard. Earlier this year she found...

Most people have never heard the word aphasia — and that’s exactly the problem. In this episode, Kristen Toepfer breaks it down from the inside out. Aphasia is a brain disorder that affects a person’s ability to speak, understand, read, write, and even process numbers — and it affects millions of stroke survivors who are left to navigate it with little public awareness and even less understanding...

In this premiere episode, Kristen Toepfer takes you back to where it all began — the bright lights of New York Fashion Week, the runway, and the dream she had worked her entire life to reach. As an industrial engineer at UPS for nearly 20 years and a model who had just walked her first NYFW show for Supermodels Unlimited Magazine, Kristen was living two lives and loving every second of it. Then ev...