"You've changed, and you won't ever go back to the person you were before caregiving." A powerful reminder from Charlotte that waiting for things to "go back to normal" keeps us from showing up for the person we are right now. 🎙️ Watch or listen to the full episode on…
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…
Telling a caregiver "let me know how I can help" accidentally puts the emotional and mental burden right back onto their shoulders. Charlotte from @thecancercaregiver breaks down the reality of what caregivers actually hear — and why simple, direct action matters more than hollow catchphrases. 🎙️ Full conversation on August…
"Sometimes what seems like the worst thing that could ever happen might be the best thing that could ever happen." In Part Two of our conversation with Marissa, we explore the extraordinary biological crossover between cancer chemotherapy and autoimmune remission—and the hard-won physical gains that are giving Marissa back her…
"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.…
How could the "Red Devil" of chemotherapy become a source of profound physical healing? After more than a decade of progressive Multiple Sclerosis, Marissa received a Stage III breast cancer diagnosis. Her care team was terrified of what aggressive chemotherapy would do to her already weakened body. What happened next…
“When she told me that I had stage three cancer and that I would need chemotherapy... I was like, ‘Yes! That’s amazing!’ My oncologist was really confused. She had never seen that kind of response.” After years of feeling sidelined by progressive Multiple Sclerosis and life in a wheelchair, hearing…
You can buy a bag of medication out-of-pocket, but you can’t find a clinic to infuse it because insurance calls the shots. When Marissa was diagnosed with progressive Multiple Sclerosis, her neurologist prescribed a high-efficacy disease-modifying therapy. But her insurance company refused to cover it — insisting she "fail first"…
"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…
How do you teach a medical student how to tell a patient they have cancer? For health sciences librarian Deborah, this isn’t just an academic exercise—it’s a classroom reality. In her role working with medical, nursing, and public health students, she helps facilitate sessions where future clinicians practice navigating these…
"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…
We are conditioned to believe that surviving a terrifying diagnosis is purely a matter of willpower. Eat right. Stay strong. Keep a positive attitude. But on the conclusion of her interview, health sciences librarian Deborah challenges this pervasive cultural myth. When her own beloved oncologist used a motivational story to…
How do you react when you find out you have nine brain tumors and need immediate, high-stakes laser surgery? If you are health sciences librarian Deborah, you geek out. On this week's episode of Changed By Cancer, Deborah describes her surreal path through the medical system as a trip where…
Fighting is getting weaker (Brenda R, Breast Stage 3) We’ve all heard the aggressive vocabulary of survival: Fight the cancer. Kill the cancer. Overcome it. But what does "fighting" actually look like when you are deep in the trenches of treatment? My sister Brenda is pulling back the curtain on…
There is a version of this podcast I imagined making before I started. I thought I’d sit across from strangers, ask them to trust me with the hardest thing that ever happened to them, and maintain a clean line between us. This is not that episode. This is my sister,…
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…
I spend my days looking at columns of numbers, trying to map out patterns of who gets sick, who survives, and why. I am trained to look at cancer through the objective lens of a dataset. But every once in a while, you meet someone who speaks your exact language—the…
We love to tell cancer patients that their health is entirely in their hands. Eat better. Exercise more. Reduce stress. But as a cancer epidemiologist, I’m here to tell you that this traditional public health framework is fundamentally flawed. We blame a patient's diet, but ignore local food deserts and…
When we talk about cancer survival statistics, we act like a percentage applies to everyone equally. But standard health statistics flatten reality. As an epidemiologist, I see the truth behind the data. The math lumps a patient in rural Montana who has to drive hours across mountain passes for treatment…
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…
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,…
"I don't want to be a burden." It’s the phrase almost every cancer patient says when the community shows up to help. When Aiona’s church congregation launched a relentless meal train to support her family through grueling Stage III chemotherapy treatments, her instinct was to try to politely call it…
"I don't want to be a burden." It’s the phrase almost every cancer patient says when the community shows up to help. When Aiona’s church congregation launched a relentless meal train to support her family through grueling Stage III chemotherapy treatments, her instinct was to try to politely call it…
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…