PODCAST · health
Advocacy at Work
by One moment. One pivot. One purpose.
Every advocate has a moment — the diagnosis, the loss, the phone call that rewired everything. Advocacy at Work explores the pivotal stories of patients, caregivers, and changemakers who turned their hardest moments into their greatest purpose. Hosted by cancer survivor and patient advocate Tim McDonald. One moment. One pivot. One purpose. www.advocacyatwork.com
Episodes
-
The Person Behind the Patient Advocate
Daniel G. Garza was already thinking about making a video on the drive home from his anal cancer diagnosis. He had spent years speaking publicly about living with HIV. Sharing what was happening to him was familiar territory. So when he received another diagnosis, he went straight to what he…
more -
When Questions Become Advocacy
There are moments when you realize that caring about someone is not the same as knowing how to help them. For Andrea Katz, that moment came in 2013, when her mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cholangiocarcinoma, a cancer of the bile ducts. It was a disease Andrea and her family had never heard…
more -
The Finance Guy Who Became the Bridge Between Patients and Nuclear Medicine
Jud Kimmel spent most of his career in public policy and finance. He wasn’t a scientist. He wasn’t a doctor. He wasn’t someone with a natural pathway into cancer advocacy. Then in September 2022, almost four years ago, he got diagnosed with stage 4 grade 3 small bowel neuroendocrine tumor. And...
-
The AI Expert Who Became His Own Case Study
John Duffield was living a completely normal life. He was working in AI. Fortune 500 companies. Helping healthcare organizations rethink how they work. Staying on top of an emerging field that was changing everything. He was a previous triathlete. Healthy. Active. Playing with his kids. No sense…
more -
The Outlier: How a Pancreatic Cancer Survivor Is Turning His Survival Into Science
The first symptom was acidity in his stomach. Yann Bizien was living a standard life in Paris in 2017. Software industry. Account manager. Selling solutions to enterprise. A four-year-old daughter. Pretty much standard health. He wasn’t the kind of guy who went to doctors. He did a little bit of...
-
The Discipline That Almost Killed Him
A retired special forces colonel. A stage 3C colon cancer diagnosis. And how the same discipline that made him a warrior almost took him down There’s a question that comes up early in most cancer conversations. “Were you having symptoms?” For Dr. Lawrence Henry, the answer was yes. He had them…
more -
Four Years, One Protocol
Ryan Bowman was born in 1991 with five congenital heart defects. One in 10 million. He had four open heart surgeries before his fifth birthday. The last one caused an acquired brain injury. Suddenly a bright, intelligent boy had to relearn how to talk, walk, eat. His mother, Deb Brooks, spent the...
-
The Rare Cancer Nobody Knows About
From dismissed period cramps to appendix cancer discovery: Why rare disease awareness months matter—and how one advocate is making sure no one else misses the warning signs Lindsay had terrible period cramps. For years, actually—as long as she can remember. Heavy bleeding, bloating that made her...
-
The Food Whisperer
I’ll be honest. When our mutual friend Vincent connected me with Adrienne Falcone Godsell, I wasn’t sure exactly where the conversation was going to go. I knew she was a chef. I knew she had a TBI, a traumatic brain injury, which, as Vincent put it, is the silent injury. The kind of thing that...
-
From Six Months to Ten Years
A suburban mom’s fall on a hiking trail led to a metastatic cancer diagnosis, and an unexpected path through clinical trials, liver transplant, and discovering that advocacy is just as healing as it is transformative Carole Motycka was living the dream. She was a suburban mom with four kids,...
-
The Only Young Person Here
Twenty-four years ago, Vanessa Ghigliotty was 28 years old and had just graduated college. She was a young mom. She was planning to study for her LSATs. She was going to be a lawyer. She had dreams, plans, a future mapped out in her mind. Then she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. “Cancer...
-
He Ignored Symptoms for 3 Years.
Andy Goodspeed ignored his symptoms for nearly three years — heartburn, fatigue, back pain he chalked up to age and restaurant work. By the time doctors found the truth, he had stage 4 gastric cancer in his bones, liver, and lymph nodes, and six months to live. He survived. And in this episode of...
-
The Revolution Will Be Organized
From pediatric cancer survivor to patient rights activist: Why one man believes the next great advocacy movement isn't about cure rates, it's about preventing health insurance from killing you In 1995, Matthew Zachary was a classically trained concert pianist entering his senior year of graduate...
-
The Unexpected Activist: How a Living Kidney Donor Became a Voice for Organ Donation
When Debbie Lundberg was getting her driver’s license, she did something that surprised her parents: she wanted to sign up as an organ donor. She was young. She wasn’t facing a health crisis. She hadn’t studied medical school or worked in healthcare. She just thought: Of course that’s what I…
more -
Being a Walking Permission Slip: How Dr. Carlos Garcia Turned Suffering Into Service
There’s a statistic Dr. Carlos Garcia carries with him: from the time a man experiences his first mental health symptom to the time he actually seeks help, on average seven years pass. Seven years. “If you sprained an ankle, you wouldn’t wait seven hours to go see a doctor,” Carlos says. “Much…
more -
From Left for Dead to Living Proof:
There’s a moment in most survivor stories where everything pivots, where the person standing on the other side of a catastrophe decides what that catastrophe is going to mean. For Vincent A. Lanci, that moment came slowly, quietly, in the form of a support group at Tampa General Hospital, where a...
-
Finding Your Lane
There’s a pattern I keep noticing with the advocates I interview. Almost none of them set out to become one. Scott K. Johnson is a perfect example. He’s lived with type 1 diabetes since the age of five, back when it was still called juvenile diabetes, before we understood that this autoimmune...
-
When Your Child's Diagnosis Becomes Your Calling
How one mother's determination to help her son led to saving lives across San Diego—and why small, local victories matter as much as Capitol Hill battles. January 10th, 2019. That’s the date Jessica Cella’s life changed forever. Her youngest son was diagnosed with primary adrenal insufficiency at...
-
From Butt Pics to Public Health
When David Russo discovered he had precancerous polyps after fighting for a colonoscopy, he uncovered a family secret: colorectal cancer had silently killed his grandfather and two cousins. Nobody had talked about it. Nobody wanted to admit it. The stigma was so strong that his own father, who’d...
-
Beyond "Just a Rash"
The Eczema That Nobody Takes Seriously Close to 31 million Americans have eczema. That’s roughly 10% of the population. Yet when most people think of eczema, they think of a minor rash—something temporary, something that goes away, something that isn’t serious. They’re wrong. “There are a lot of...
-
Speaking About the Unspeakable
The Barriers Nobody Talks About When most people think of colorectal cancer advocacy, they might picture statistics, awareness campaigns, or calls to get screened. But for Marielle McLeod, the work goes much deeper. Nine years out from her colorectal cancer diagnosis, Marielle has become a fierce...
-
The Power of Showing Up
A Loss That Sparked Purpose In 2004, Casie Shimanski’s younger sister Kellie died at just 18 years old. Kellie wasn’t diagnosed with cancer. But the similarities haunted Casie—the symptoms that mimicked what friends and cancer patients would later describe, the multiple organ system failure that...
-
From Isolation to Impact
A Young Woman With No Warning Signs Allison Rosen was 32 years old, in the best shape of her life, when she noticed something wrong. She had Crohn’s disease, so she was hyper-aware of her digestive system. She knew her body well. And something felt different—something unusual. “When I would eat…
more -
Building Careers and Movements
The Accidental Advocate (Before He Got Sick) Michael Holtz’s journey into cancer advocacy didn’t start with a cancer diagnosis. It started with a hospital PR job and a bus tour. In 2002, the American Cancer Society was promoting Celebration on the Hill, an event designed to bring 10,000 people to...
-
From Stage Four to a Movement
The Isolation That Nearly Killed Him Trevor Maxwell was 41 years old, living what he thought was a normal middle-class life with two daughters, when he was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer in March 2018. “It was like a life asteroid,” he says. “You have one life before cancer and then all…
more -
Preventing Cancer Before It Happens
A Sister’s Legacy Becomes a National Movement In 2005, a woman named Kristen Linquist lost her sister Suzie to young-onset colorectal cancer. Suzie had been active in the running community in Seattle, Washington, and Kristen wanted to honor her memory in a way that felt authentic to who Suzie had...
-
Finding Your Lane
The Bathroom Floor Moment That Started It All JJ Singleton was 27 years old when he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in September 2015. For years, he endured what most cancer patients don’t want to talk about: the relentless physical and mental toll that no amount of disease awareness…
more -
The Long Game of Advocacy
There’s a common misconception about advocacy: that it’s something you do once and expect immediate results. But the reality is far more nuanced—and far more powerful. In a conversation with Anjee Davis, CEO of Fight Colorectal Cancer (Fight CRC), we explore how patient advocacy operates as a...
-
From Surviving to Serving
Liz Healy's story is one of resilience, but more importantly, it's a story about choosing service when you've been handed circumstances that would justify despair. If you or someone you know is facing a cancer diagnosis, organizations like the Colorectal Cancer Alliance, Colontown, and Fight CRC...
-
From Financial Assistance to Political Action
When Amy Niles joined the PAN Foundation in 2014, the organization was a financial lifeline—providing grants to help patients afford medications. But she saw an untapped opportunity: what if they could also harness the voices of the hundreds of thousands of patients they served to change the...
We're indexing this podcast's transcripts for the first time — this can take a minute or two. We'll show results as soon as they're ready.
No matches for "" in this podcast's transcripts.
No topics indexed yet for this podcast.
Loading reviews...
ABOUT THIS SHOW
Every advocate has a moment — the diagnosis, the loss, the phone call that rewired everything. Advocacy at Work explores the pivotal stories of patients, caregivers, and changemakers who turned their hardest moments into their greatest purpose. Hosted by cancer survivor and patient advocate Tim McDonald. One moment. One pivot. One purpose.
www.advocacyatwork.com
HOSTED BY
One moment. One pivot. One purpose.
CATEGORIES
Loading similar podcasts...
Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Advocacy at Work have?
Advocacy at Work currently has 30 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Advocacy at Work about?
Every advocate has a moment — the diagnosis, the loss, the phone call that rewired everything. Advocacy at Work explores the pivotal stories of patients, caregivers, and changemakers who turned their hardest moments into their greatest purpose. Hosted by cancer survivor and patient advocate Tim...
How often does Advocacy at Work release new episodes?
Advocacy at Work has 30 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Advocacy at Work?
You can listen to Advocacy at Work on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Advocacy at Work?
Advocacy at Work is created and hosted by One moment. One pivot. One purpose..
URL copied to clipboard!