A Body Rebels: A Chronic Illness Podcast
A Body Rebels is a lived-experience podcast about sarcoidosis, heart failure, rare disease, chronic illness, and the strange daily reality of living in a body that does not always cooperate.
I’m Tate — a private chef, writer, husband, pet parent, and long-term sarcoidosis survivor. This podcast is not about miracle cures, medical lectures, or pretending a positive attitude fixes everything. It is about the honest middle of chronic illness: the fatigue, fear, grief, humor, stubbornness, absurdity, and small victories that come with surviving day after day.
These are first-person stories about illness, identity, marriage, work, memory, resilience, and learning how to live inside a life that changed without asking permission.
This podcast is for people living with chronic illness, sarcoidosis, rare disease, heart failure, autoimmune conditions, invisible illness, or any body that feels like it has gone off-script. It is also for caregivers, spouses, family, and friends who want to understand illness from the inside.
If you are tired of toxic positivity, pity, miracle-cure noise, and being told to “just stay strong,” you are in the right place.
This is for the sick, the tired, the stubborn, the scared, the sarcastic, the hopeful, and everyone trying to build a life in a body that rebels.
Episodes
80 episodes
When Anger Feels Easier Than Hope
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 bitternes...
MiniCast: Chronic Illness and Fear: The Small Habits Your Body Quietly Erases
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 aff...
Chronic Illness, Old Friends, and the Cost of Unequal Relationships
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 ti...
When Hospital Anxiety Shows Up After Years of Chronic Illness
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 chron...
What Three Stone Steps Taught Me About Chronic Illness Avoidance
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 ...
MiniCast: The Hidden Side Effects of Prednisone No One Warns You About
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 ...
Love, Caregiving, and Chronic Illness: The Spouse Who Helps You Survive
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, car...
Oxygen Therapy in Public and the Quiet Social Reality of Living with Sarcoidosis
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 e...
The Waiting Room Anxiety Nobody Talks About: Chronic Illness Test Results and Relief
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...
The Guilt I Carried That Was Never Mine: Living with Chronic Illness and Letting Go
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 ...
Why “You Don’t Look Sick” Doesn’t Offend Me: Chronic Illness, Friendship, and Looking Fine When You’re Not
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 expl...
The Strange Math of Chronic Illness: What Sarcoidosis Taught Me About Expectations
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.
The Smoking Backpack: Chronic Illness in Public
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...
MiniCast: When the Wild Speaks: The Night a Fox and a Crow Changed Everything
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 mir...
Getting an AICD: What the Surgery Felt Like From the Hospital Bed
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 ...
The Day the Hospital Treated Me Like a Human Being
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 rig...
MiniCast: Stop Saying You’re Allergic to Bees (When You’re Really Just Terrified of Nature)
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. Spo...
Why I Don’t Say I Suffer From Sarcoidosis
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...
When Spring Returns to a Chronically Ill Body
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. Th...
MiniCast: The Day I Danced with a Monarch: A Reminder That Nature Still Wins
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 e...
CAR-T, Autoimmune Disease, and the Strange Hope of a One-Time Treatment
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 u...
You Didn’t Deserve This: Sarcoidosis, Shame, and Letting Go of Guilt
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 tha...
When Insurance Says No: A Sarcoidosis Story About Unexpected Help
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 sarcoido...
Chronic Illness, Sarcoidosis, and the Absurdity of Racial Assumptions
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, ch...
When the New Pulmonologist Asked About a Lung Transplant, I Already Knew My Answer
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 enoug...
