Thoughts While Surviving Chronic Illness: Ramblings From a Chef Whose Body Constantly Rebels

My health has reached a point where pushing through no longer works. In this short episode, I explain why I’m ending Season Four early and taking the rest of September away from the podcast. I need my limited energy for treatment, appointments, symptoms, and the work of getting through each day. I also need space to experience this difficult period without turning every part of it into something productive. I’ll return at the end of September to begin Season Five with more stories from life inside a rebellious body.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

In this episode of A Body Rebels: A Chronic Illness Podcast, I talk about exercise while living with heart failure, sarcoidosis, and severe fatigue after movement. A walk feels good while I’m outside, then the real cost shows up at home through heavy legs, harder breathing, a shower, and the need to lie down. I still want movement in my life. I also need enough energy for my private-chef work and the rest of my day. I’m learning to treat recovery as part of movement instead of proof I failed.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

In this episode, I’m talking about ambiguous loss and the private grief of missing the person I was before chronic illness changed my body. An old pair of shoes, a photograph, or even a heavy kitchen tool can bring that earlier life rushing back. I explore how illness has changed my independence, work, relationships, and identity, and why accepting my current body doesn’t require me to erase who I used to be, deny what I’ve lost, or pretend I’m grateful for every change.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

I’m sharing what happened when a limping black bear crossed the road in front of me on a quiet drive through rural Connecticut. Watching that injured animal continue into the woods brought my own experience with chronic illness into sharper focus. I’ve spent years measuring strength by what I could once do, how quickly I could move, and how well I could hide the struggle. That bear gave me another way to look at determination, physical limitations, acceptance, and the careful steps required to keep living in a body that has changed.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

I missed an episode this week, and there was a very good reason. My fifth attempt to come off prednisone after twenty years hit me harder than I ever expected. With methotrexate now being used as a steroid-sparing medication, I’ve managed to reach just 2.5 milligrams of prednisone, but the pain, nausea, edema and crushing fatigue have been brutal. I’m sharing what happened when I became so exhausted at work that even standing at the stove no longer felt safe, and why I finally chose myself first.TiTIdc9RNr4bCkFaqu7vThis podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

When a chronic illness flare sends me back to bed with oxygen, physical exhaustion can quickly become fear about my future. I start wondering whether I’ll recover or whether my independence is slipping away permanently. I used to hide those fears from my wife because I thought I was protecting her. Now I understand that honesty means trusting her and remaining honest with myself. In this episode, I confront uncertainty, physical decline, and the frightening question of whether one terrible day could become my new reality.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

In this episode, I talk about a driver’s license renewal that turned into an unexpected panic at the DMV. One question on one form forced me to think about my AICD, heart medication, and the fear of losing the independence I count on every day. I’m looking at medical honesty, the cost of disclosure, and what happens when protecting my health suddenly feels tangled up with protecting my freedom.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Why does time seem to move faster once chronic illness becomes part of your life? In this episode of Surviving Chronic Illness: Life In A Body That Rebels, I reflect on the strange speed of adulthood, the emotional weight of creating something personal, and why the word “peace” drew more attention than any medical term ever could. For people living with sarcoidosis, heart failure, rare disease, or any long-term condition, peace can start to feel less like a luxury and more like the thing we’re quietly trying to protect. This is a personal reflection on time, acceptance, and learning what not to fight.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

In this episode, I’m sharing what went through my mind after someone newly diagnosed with neurosarcoidosis told me that hearing my voice helped calm their fear. I’ve lived with sarcoidosis for twenty years, and during that time, my relationship with mortality has changed. I still want more life, more ordinary mornings, and more time with the people I love. But I no longer want fear of death to consume the days I’m still here to live. I’m talking about acceptance, suffering, uncertainty, and the chapter in front of me.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

In this episode, I talk about an email accusing me of sounding too positive to be believable. I’m looking at why hope doesn’t erase pain, why gratitude isn’t denial, and why sick people shouldn’t have to perform despair to prove they’re suffering. I share what fear, breathlessness, fatigue, medical trauma, and uncertainty actually feel like in my life, while explaining why humor and warmth are still allowed in the same room. I’m not pretending illness is easy. I’m refusing to let it speak for all of me.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

A Body Re-Bells has a brand-new sound! In this special episode, I reveal the emotional version of our new original theme song, featuring lyrics written by me especially for the podcast. Listen now and let me know what you think!This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

A Body Re-Bells has a brand-new sound! In this special episode, I reveal the upbeat version of our new original theme song, featuring lyrics written by me especially for the podcast. Listen now and let me know what you think!This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

I’m talking about the assumptions people made about my mental health after I became seriously ill, and why sadness, grief, anger, and depression aren’t interchangeable. I share what happened when my first therapist insisted on treating a diagnosis I didn’t recognize in myself, and how Buddhist and shamanic psychotherapy later helped me examine illness, resentment, guilt, childhood wounds, and self-blame. This episode isn’t an argument against conventional therapy. It’s about finding an approach, and a person, that allows me to speak in my own language.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

In this episode, I talk about what it felt like to hear doctors put numbers on my future, then keep living past the dates that once scared me. I’m reflecting on stage four sarcoidosis, heart failure, scarred lungs, medical uncertainty, and the strange math of planning a life when no one can promise how much time is waiting. This isn’t a miracle story. It’s about fear, adaptation, dark humor, and the ordinary days that feel different when I wasn’t sure I’d reach them.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

In this episode, I’m talking about kindness in healthcare, bedside manner, chronic illness care, and why the emotional side of medical appointments can follow me long after I leave the room. Living with sarcoidosis means I’ve spent years around scans, charts, vitals, instructions, and waiting rooms, but I also remember tone, patience, eye contact, and small moments of steadiness. I’m thinking through why basic kindness is not a luxury in medical care, especially when my body is already tired before the appointment begins.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

In this episode, I’m talking about a silly song I sing to my dogs, a language I don’t actually speak, and the strange AI surprise that came back when I finally let technology listen. I’m reflecting on ancestry, imagination, chronic illness, memory, and the little rituals that sneak into daily life when my body is tired but my mind is still wandering. It starts with puppies, a tug toy, and nonsense sounds, but it opens a door I didn’t expect.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

In this episode, I talk about my cousin Jenny, a childhood memory I’ve carried for more than fifty years, and the way grief can return through laughter before it ever knows what to do with itself. I’m reflecting on family distance, ovarian cancer, chronic illness, and what it feels like when my body keeps me far from a goodbye I wish I could attend. It’s about cousins, memory, regret, love, and the strange little details that keep people alive inside us.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

In this episode, I talk about an ordinary drive home that turned into a quiet reminder of how fragile life can be. I’m reflecting on a young neighbor’s sudden death, the strange grief of witnessing loss from a distance, and the promise my wife and I made never to leave each other angry. I also talk about chronic illness, uncertainty, marriage, and why small goodbyes deserve more care than we usually give them.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Sometimes the smallest details in a story say more than the story itself. In this reflective episode, I talk about the way people describe strangers, the racial details they choose to include, and the quiet assumptions that can slip into everyday storytelling. This is a personal, conversational look at bias, fear, self-awareness, and the uncomfortable gap between what people believe about themselves and what their words sometimes reveal before they’ve had a chance to notice.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

In this episode, I’m talking about the grief of missing who I used to be before chronic illness changed my body, my confidence, and the way I moved through life. I’m reflecting on identity, acceptance, and the quiet habit of measuring today’s body against yesterday’s freedom. Through a memory from Sedona, Arizona, I revisit a moment when I had to face what I’d lost, what I was still carrying, and how hard it can be to care for the person who remains.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

In this episode, I’m talking about the new name, the new season, and why I needed a podcast title that felt closer to the stories I actually tell. I’m thinking about chronic illness, identity, breath, survival, and what it means to keep going without pretending I’ve become a brand-new person. The name has changed, but the voice, humor, medical reality, stubbornness, and lived experience underneath it are still mine. I’m starting fresh without erasing what came before.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Living with chronic illness often means depending on treatments that help one part of the body while making another part miserable. In this episode, I talk about prednisone, steroid side effects, sarcoidosis, sleep disruption, hunger, medication dependence, and the strange emotional math of needing something you also resent. It’s a grounded, personal look at survival, adaptation, humor, and the small daily tricks people with chronic illness use to get through the day with some dignity still intact.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

After reading a blog by someone living with heart failure and pulmonary hypertension, I found myself thinking about the line between anger and surrender in chronic illness. Anger makes sense when your body becomes a full-time job, but bitterness can quietly lock every door. In this episode, I talk about hope, medical trauma, healing, and why believing in possibility isn’t the same as pretending everything is fine. Living with sarcoidosis and heart failure has taught me that hope doesn’t cure everything, but it can keep you involved in your own life when illness keeps trying to shrink it.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

One morning I realized I had stopped doing something completely ordinary. Stretching. Not because I chose to, but because somewhere along the way my body decided it wasn’t safe anymore. Living with sarcoidosis and heart failure doesn’t just affect your health in obvious ways. It quietly rewrites your instincts. The biggest changes don’t always happen in hospitals or test results. Sometimes they show up in small, almost invisible moments. This episode explores how fear lingers in the body, how survival rewires behavior, and how chronic illness reshapes everyday life in ways we don’t notice until something simple disappears.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Sometimes the most exhausting part of chronic illness isn’t the appointments, the symptoms, the insurance nonsense, or the daily negotiations with a body that refuses to behave. Sometimes it’s an old relationship that comes back acting as if time erased the imbalance. In this episode, I talk about childhood friendship, unresolved feelings, one-sided effort, awkward reconnections, and the quiet relief of realizing that shared history doesn’t automatically earn access to your present life. Chronic illness has made my energy feel more limited, more expensive, and far less available for people who only remember me when someone else hands them my address.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Medical trauma doesn’t always announce itself during the obvious terrifying moments. Sometimes it waits until an ordinary hospital visit, after routine blood work, when everything should feel familiar and manageable. This episode explores chronic illness, sarcoidosis, heart failure, hospital anxiety, panic attacks, and the way the body can store fear long after the mind thinks it has handled the hard parts. It’s about endurance, fear, shame, humor, and learning that a reaction is not a failure.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Living with chronic illness is not always shaped by dramatic medical events. Sometimes it is shaped by the tiny detours we quietly build into our days. In this episode, I talk about realizing I had been avoiding three ordinary stone steps, and what that small moment revealed about sarcoidosis, heart failure, fear, adaptation, and the slow way a life can shrink by inches. This is a personal, reflective, lightly funny look at avoidance, resilience, breathlessness, and the private negotiations we make with our bodies when ordinary things start asking more from us than they used to.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Sometimes it is not the big symptoms that stop you in your tracks. It is the quiet ones. The bruises you cannot explain. The skin that tears a little too easily. Living with sarcoidosis and long term prednisone use means learning how your body changes in ways no one really prepares you for. In this episode, I talk about those small but unsettling moments, the kind that make you pause and ask what is happening to me now. Because chronic illness is not just about survival. It is about adapting to a body that keeps rewriting the rules.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Living with chronic illness affects more than the person with the diagnosis. It changes marriage, caregiving, routines, fear, and the quiet emotional work shared inside a home. In this episode, I reflect on sarcoidosis, heart failure, love, caregiving, and the spouse who has helped me survive the hardest parts of my life. This is a personal story about marriage under pressure, the unseen weight caregivers carry, and the kind of love that notices breathing, fatigue, fear, stubbornness, and hope without turning any of it into pity. For anyone living with chronic illness, or loving someone who is, this episode is about being held through it.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Wearing oxygen in public with sarcoidosis changes more than breathing. It changes the way people look at you, the way they try not to look at you, and the quiet assumptions they carry about what chronic illness is supposed to look like. In elevators, stores, and ordinary public spaces, those silent reactions tell their own story. This episode explores oxygen therapy, visible illness, social discomfort, and the strange gap between expectation and reality. It is about being seen, being misread, and learning that sometimes the hardest part of chronic illness is not the symptom itself, but what happens when the world suddenly notices it.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Waiting for medical test results with chronic illness can feel like sitting through an awards show you never agreed to attend. Every pause carries weight, every glance feels loaded, and your mind fills in the blanks before anyone speaks. Living with sarcoidosis and heart failure means learning how to exist in that space between testing and knowing. But sometimes, the outcome shifts. Sometimes your body gives something back. This is a story about that moment when fear loosens its grip, even briefly, and you’re reminded that relief, even temporary, still matters.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

A moment from childhood can quietly shape how we carry guilt for decades. In this episode, I share the story of losing my stepfather at thirteen and the belief I carried for years that it was somehow my fault. Living with sarcoidosis and heart issues has taught me that emotional weight does not just live in the mind, it settles into the body. This is a reflection on how the stories we create in moments of trauma can linger, and how slowly, imperfectly, we begin to let them go.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Invisible illness can make ordinary social moments surprisingly complicated. A simple comment, a changed friendship, or a curious question can turn into an emotional negotiation when your body carries more than people can see. This episode explores chronic illness, invisible symptoms, privacy, boundaries, friendship, dignity, and the pressure to explain yourself. It’s about living in a body that doesn’t always advertise what it’s doing, while still wanting to be treated as a whole person, not a walking medical summary.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

People sometimes ask how anyone living with sarcoidosis can stay positive day after day. The answer isn’t motivation, inspiration, or some magical personality trait. It’s something quieter… something most people miss entirely.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

A doctor’s waiting room is usually boring. Mine briefly turned into a low-budget suspense film because my portable oxygen backpack looked like it was smoking. Living with sarcoidosis and chronic illness means getting used to equipment, routines, and symptoms that feel normal to you but deeply suspicious to everyone else. What started as an ordinary appointment became one of those strange public moments where illness stops being private and starts becoming a spectacle. It was awkward, absurd, and, honestly, a little funny. Because sometimes the only way to survive the weirdness of living inside a body that makes its own rules is to laugh before somebody calls security.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

On a quiet sunset drive, I stumbled into a raw moment between a fox and a crow—two wild creatures locked in instinct and mystery. What began as an ordinary evening turned into a reflection on survival, intuition, and the strange ways nature mirrors our own chronic-illness battles.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Getting an AICD implanted is not just a procedure. It is the moment heart failure stops sounding like a diagnosis on paper and starts feeling real in your body. In this episode, I share what it was actually like to hear I needed an implantable defibrillator, wait in fear, go under the operating lights, feel the strange sensations no brochure mentions, and wake up with emergency hardware in my chest. This is not the polished hospital version. It is the patient version, the human version, for anyone facing an AICD implant and wanting the truth in plain language from someone who has lived it.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Hospital visits can start to feel like rehearsed disappointment when you live with sarcoidosis, heart failure, and the long, exhausting reality of chronic illness. I know that feeling well. So when I went to Westchester Medical Center for a right heart catheterization and was met with kindness, answers, eye contact, and actual respect, it caught me completely off guard. In this episode, I talk about why simple human decency can change the emotional weight of a procedure, why bad attitudes linger in the body, and why compassion in healthcare is not some deluxe extra. Sometimes good care is not only about what gets done. Sometimes it is about how you are treated while it happens.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Ever wonder why everyone suddenly claims they’re “allergic to bees”? In this cheeky yet heartfelt take from a chef living with chronic illness, I explore what our bee phobia really says about fear, faith, and city folks who panic at pollen. Spoiler: the bees aren’t the problem.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

The words we use for chronic illness matter more than most people realize. In this episode, I reflect on a question my wife asked back in 2011, a question that changed the way I talk about sarcoidosis, heart failure, and illness itself. I share why I’ve never been comfortable saying I “suffer from” my diagnoses, and why that distinction became about more than language. It became about dignity, identity, and survival. Chronic illness is exhausting, frightening, and sometimes brutal, but the words we repeat to ourselves can shape how we carry it, and whether we let it become the whole story.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Spring has a way of looking hopeful while also trying to crawl directly into your sinuses. In this episode, I talk about what it means to live with sarcoidosis, heart issues, and the shifting realities of chronic illness through the seasons. This is about pollen, fatigue, beauty, grief, adaptation, and those quiet moments that still manage to feel like life. If you live with sarcoidosis, chronic illness, or love someone who does, this episode is a grounded look at how the body negotiates change while the world keeps blooming anyway.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

After a week of rain and gray skies, I stepped outside and found myself face-to-face with a monarch butterfly—a rare, breathtaking sight that reminded me why we let dandelions grow and bees buzz in our yard. Here's why moments like these mean everything when you're living with chronic illness and still trying to find joy in the little things.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

A treatment built for cancer is now doing something that sounds almost unreal in autoimmune disease. In this episode, I talk through a story about CAR-T cell therapy, a woman whose body had been attacking her from multiple directions, and the uneasy hope that comes with hearing the words remission, reset, and maybe even recovery. This isn’t a miracle story, because real bodies are messier than that. But it is a story about what it means when medicine stops just managing suffering and starts asking whether the whole system can be rebooted. And for people who live inside unpredictable bodies, that question hits home.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

What happens when chronic illness shows up and your first instinct is to blame yourself? In this episode of Thoughts While Surviving Chronic Illness, Tate reflects on growing up with guilt, being taught to question himself, and how that old wiring followed him into life with sarcoidosis. This is a quiet, honest conversation about shame, fear, faith, and the heavy stories we attach to illness. If you have ever wondered whether you caused your condition, deserved your suffering, or somehow failed your own body, this episode is a reminder that illness is not punishment, and guilt is not something you have to carry forever.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Chronic illness teaches you that control is often an illusion. Tests, insurance approvals, medications, and diagnoses can feel like they belong to systems far bigger than the person living inside the body.For someone living with sarcoidosis and heart complications, routine medical tests are never really routine. They can determine whether the disease is quiet… or quietly returning.But every once in a while something unexpected happens.A phone call.A decision made by someone behind the scenes.A moment where the system that usually feels rigid suddenly bends in a human direction.And sometimes those small moments remind you that living with chronic illness isn’t only about what the body loses… it’s also about what life quietly gives back.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

After writing about winter tearing up my hands and posting a photo of my cracked, bleeding knuckles, I got an email that was less compassionate and more confused that I was not the race the sender expected. This episode is about sarcoidosis, chronic illness, medical stereotypes, and the exhausting way people reduce human beings to categories instead of meeting them with empathy. It is about what happens when statistics stop being information and start becoming assumptions, and why people living with rare disease deserve to be seen as people first, not demographic surprises. Because pain is pain, illness is illness, and ignorance adds nothing useful to either.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

After insurance forced me to leave the pulmonologist who had known my lungs for twenty years, a brand-new doctor asked a question that hit me like a dropped skillet: had anyone discussed putting me on the transplant list? If you live long enough with sarcoidosis and serious lung disease, transplant eventually enters the room. But hearing the question and wanting the answer to be yes are not the same thing. This episode is about that first appointment, the shock of being asked so bluntly, and why my answer was already there, waiting.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

I learned respect the slow way—by watching what happened when women spoke and men decided they were “too much.” By listening in kitchens where the food mattered more than the people making it. And by living long enough with sarcoidosis and heart failure to realize time is expensive, energy is limited, and “just ignore it” is the laziest advice on earth. This isn’t a victory speech or a halo-polishing session. It’s the story of how a kid who stayed quiet learned when silence starts sounding like agreement… and what finally made me stop swallowing my words.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

When you grow up learning who doesn’t show up, you start measuring love in smaller, sharper ways—like footsteps on a porch, a hand on your forehead at the school nurse’s office, or the kind of laughter that keeps you upright when your body (hello, sarcoidosis) is acting like it pays rent. This is about the dad I lost too soon—the one who earned the title—and the strange little lessons that followed me into adulthood… right up to cardiology appointments and the moments I have to decide whether I’m going to fold or make a joke.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research 

Some people collect souvenirs when they travel. I collect medical printouts. One routine cardiology visit handed me a neat little report, the kind that looks boring until you realize it’s basically a receipt for a moment your body tried to freestyle without permission. If you live with sarcoidosis and heart failure, you already know the feeling: you can be doing something painfully normal, and then your insides decide to audition for a disaster movie. This is the story of the day my heart tested the emergency system—and what it taught me about limits, denial, and why “I’m fine” is sometimes a full-blown lie.This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.Contact A Body RebelsMore info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research