Sickboy

What does managing type 1 diabetes look like at 200 km/h? Chase Pelletier started karting at ten and received his diabetes diagnosis about a month later. Now a championship winner and race engineer, he joins the guys to unpack the physical demands of racing, the preparation that happens before he ever straps in, and why his mechanic can follow his blood sugar from the pit wall. Chase shares how technology has changed his confidence...

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 tr...

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...

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 abo...

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 uncomfortabl...

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 curren...

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, setti...

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 daug...

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 to...

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 wha...

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...

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 shots of soy sauce out of the fridge,...

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: from compressing her chest a...

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 roulette. Krystal shares the raw, ...

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 artificial intelligence and medicine. ...

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 inner voice shut up. We’re t...

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 her one year to live. Spoi...

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 drugs like Trikafta, those w...

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" and the accidental discovery of the...