Meet Sickboy, the comedy podcast that’s altering the best way we take into consideration sickness (and life)

Sickboy will not be your commonplace medical podcast.

In truth, regardless that it has over 2 million whole downloads, and write-ups in the Guardian, Vice, and the BBC, they didn’t get there by speaking about illness cautiously.

In Sickboy, you’ll discover no stiff recommendation from docs, or buttoned-up discussions about illnesses and coverings. The podcast’s hosts Jeremie Saunders, Brian Stever, and Taylor MacGillivary need none of that. Their present is for folks to speak about what it’s actually prefer to dwell with illness (and for its hosts to inform a number of R-rated jokes alongside the best way).

It’s secure to say that Sickboy, which has been on Patreon since 2016, is a health-centric podcast not like another you’ve heard earlier than.

How Sickboy makes use of humor to open up a dialog about usually taboo matters

Moderately than having a health-based podcast solely that includes docs or specialists, many of the visitors on Sickboy know the medical business from the opposite aspect of the clipboard.

Friends go on Sickboy to speak about their experiences with a variety of medical illnesses, from psychological sicknesses like schizophrenia or consuming issues, to residing life and not using a pulse (you learn that proper).

And the way do the hosts break the ice with visitors about such private matters? They do it with comedy.

With humor, the Sickboy hosts present an genuine setting for his or her visitors to share intimate and life-affirming tales about residing with sickness. And, as a listener, whether or not you’re “wholesome” or not, the result’s liberating, instructional, and infrequently laugh-out-loud humorous.

“It’s not humorous to be sick. However there’s humor throughout the human expertise of residing with sickness,” mentioned Brian Stever, one of many hosts of the Sickboy podcast. “The humor is de facto simply the instrument to get to the true meat of the dialog, which is the human expertise of being sick.”

Dwelling with cystic fibrosis

Jeremie Saunders, the brainchild of Sickboy, has one thing in frequent with the visitors of the podcast — he’s residing with a illness, too.

Jeremie lives with cystic fibrosis (or CF), a illness that largely impacts his lungs, (but it surely impacts different organs in his physique, as effectively).

In between recording episodes of Sickboy, Jeremie mentioned he takes 50 capsules a day (“most of that’s with a view to preserve my digestive system working correctly”). Plus, he spends round two hours a day utilizing a nebulizer, a machine which turns liquid medication into vapor to maintain his lungs functioning correctly.

As a result of he lives with CF, Jeremie is aware of that speaking about illness can generally make folks really feel awkward. So, with Sickboy, the co-hosts use Jeremie’s uncomfortable experiences to create a roadmap of how not to have a dialog about illness.

“[When] I’m going to take a seat down and discuss to somebody who has terminal t-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma…I do know that, yo — you’re in all probability dying to speak about this shit. So I’m right here. Let’s do that. Let’s take it wherever you wish to take it,” mentioned Jeremie.

How did these creators give you the thought for Sickboy?

The thought for Sickboy was born out of a spot of frustration for Jeremie. In 2015, Jeremie had hit a wall in his profession as an actor in movie and tv when the slashing of a film-tax credit score in Nova Scotia, “mainly dried up all of the movie and tv work in Halifax.”

“I used to be going via this beautiful deep bout of melancholy as a result of I got here to understand fairly rapidly that I’m a artistic, pushed individual. I felt like I had wasted all this time in my life, pouring all this power into this factor that I really like — but, I have to depend on so many different folks to do the factor that I’ve such a deep ardour for.”

Fortunately quickly after, Jeremie was impressed to start out a podcast when he heard a chat by the Canadian podcaster and movie director Kevin Smith.

“I simply keep in mind [Smith] saying, ‘podcasting is the proper type of artistic expression…,’” Jeremie mentioned. “As a result of each single individual on this auditorium has a mobile phone, and everyone on this auditorium has an concept or a subject or a topic that they’re obsessed with. So you’re taking these two issues and you place them collectively, and proper there, you’ve got a podcast.”

As Jeremie sat in his seat, listening to the discuss, he was struck with an concept for a brand new sort of podcast.

“I’ve obtained a subject I can discuss,” Jeremie remembered pondering. “I dwell with a persistent and deadly illness, and I’ve discovered humor in that have for my whole life.”

The pressures of being an impartial creator

Since then, Sickboy has printed 195 episodes (to this point). The podcast will get 100,000 distinctive downloads per 30 days and has near 10,000 followers on Fb. And, due to their giant listenership, the hosts really feel an actual accountability to publish considerate, weekly content material for his or her followers, lots of whom are going via sicknesses of their very own.

Regardless of holding day jobs outdoors of the podcast, the trio have solely missed their objective of releasing a weekly episode as soon as (and that was on Christmas).“So as an alternative of really placing an episode out…I did a recording of studying the Grinch and put that out as an alternative.”

“If we get to some extent the place — shit, we’re two days away from Monday, and we don’t have an episode…then we simply do no matter it takes,” mentioned Jeremie. “And we offer that on that coming Monday as a result of we’ve made a promise to tens of hundreds of those that that’s what we’re going to offer.”

Nonetheless, regardless of on a regular basis and energy the present takes, the podcasters benefit from the conversations they’ve on Sickboy a lot that it hardly seems like work to them.

“The factor that’s most vital to me is the truth that I sit up for each single dialog,” mentioned Brian. “And I sit up for spending time with Taylor and Jeremie and assembly new folks, so it doesn’t really feel like work…it’s like, how do we discover the time to do extra of that and fewer of the opposite stuff?”