Covid Listen to Episodes

Our guest today is the incomparable Pat McCorkle, head and founder of McCorkle Casting and a Covid survivor! As actors, we understand the frustration of the industry during the pandemic, so we were eager to hear Pat’s point of view from the other side of the table. Rather than talking about zoom fatigue, we discuss its advantages and how it creates more opportunities for people to be seen. We also talk about how scripts have evolved over the last year, her personal experience with covid, and mov...

We’re closing out Mental Health Awareness Month with Dana, an introverted oncology nurse & parent - all this to say, she’s got many reasons to be fatigued. In a time where we’re more isolated than ever, Dana has experienced the opposite: she goes to work and is surrounded by people, she comes home and she’s surrounded by people (her husband and three adorable children we might add). With all of these humans around, there’s no opportunity for her to recharge her batteries. However exhausted she m...

This week we talked to Dr. Sadie Whittaker, the Chief Scientific Officer of Solve ME/CFS Initiative- a nonprofit whose mission is to find a cure for & end Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. The developments with ME/CFS are paving the way to understanding Long Covid. She is also the Chief Scientific Officer of You + Me: a registry and biobank that collects patient-recorded data & biological samples that are passed on to researchers to drive discovery & cure! Sweet! “I’m a big bel...

TW: death & grief This week we connected with Victoria Noe, an award-winning author, speaker and activist. She is the perfect candidate for Mental Health Awareness month because of her contributions to the AIDS community & her writing about grief, particularly her Friend Grief series which recognizes the importance of friendships in shaping our lives. A little background about Viki: her HIV/AIDS activism led her to write Fag Hags, Divas and Moms: The Legacy of Straight Women in the AIDS Communi...

Welcome to Mental Health Awareness Month! We've got a series of interviews we really think you'll enjoy. We begin with Kate, a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, specializing in complex trauma and complex PTSD. Some of her work includes the Crisis Intervention Team for the Knoxville police department which involves helping EMT service, fire rescue, and police sheriffs. We describe her as "the helper's helper" and take comfort that there's someone out there to aid our first responders....

Surprise: we’re our own guests this week! Both of us share our vaccine stories and experiences. At this point Raymond has received both doses and Caroline has gotten her first. (Hashtag Team Pfizer.) Unrelated but after staying home for a year with unlimited access to your toilet, has anyone else noticed their bladder’s capacity significantly decrease? We discuss that at length lol. We also talk about why we like our podcast and what we’ve learned from it, and we want to hear from you! What do y...

Our guest this week is Jill, a compassionate & determined woman with a big heart and too many emotions for one person to contain. Her big heart led her to a position as an early childhood special education teacher in St. Louis, which has taught her a lot about herself: particularly that she's capable of pivoting on a dime to provide the education her students' need and protecting herself and other teachers in the process. She says, "It goes without saying that all of the success with virtual and...

We round out our Parosmia Series with Gemma who experiences parosmia and it's equally evil twin: phantosmia. For those who don't know, phantosmia is an olfactory hallucination that makes you smell things that aren't there. For Gemma it's a persistent smell of cigarette smoke (which was one of her least favorite smells to begin with). It makes mealtime unbearable and alienates her from sharing that time with her beautiful family. However, she's brilliant at turning lemons into lemonade: when she ...

In our fourth episode, we talk with Anissa - the self-described "cook of the family" who can barely bring herself to eat anything besides peanut m&ms. She spoke to us about how parosmia disconnects her from the rest of the world: she can't eat enough to keep up her fitness regimen, celebratory & holiday meals once full of connection and memory are uncomfortable, and she is left with the question "am I stuck like this?" In spite of her frustration, she has found a wonderful outlet: photography. ...

We're kicking off Season 2 with a series about parosmia, perhaps the most odd and startling long-hauler symptom to date. Parosmia is dysfunctional smell detection characterized by the inability of the brain to correctly identify an odor's "natural" smell. Instead, the natural odor is usually transformed into an unpleasant aroma, typically a "'burned,' 'rotting,' 'fecal,' or 'chemical' smell". Pre-pandemic this was a symptom often found in patients undergoing chemotherapy treatment or persons rec...

Fatigued Podcast was born out of two friends getting Covid and sharing their experiences. Listen to learn more about this project, who they've interviewed, how it's helped, and where it's going from here. Full episodes and links to your favorite podcast players at www.fatiguedpodcast.com

Caroline and Raymond (and an awkward little-sounding voice) say goodbye to Season One. Our cohosts give updates on their personal Covid stories, tell us about what's coming up in Season Two (launching March 9th, 2021), and why this shift has them excited and not fatigued. In just 3 months, we've built out a one-stop-shop website and social media pages and Fatigued Podcast has reached thousands of listeners across every podcast platform playable. We would not be continuing without the supportive...

This is our final interview for Season 1 and it's our biggest one to date: we got a chance to interview Dr. Keith Gagnon, an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at SIU whose lab has uncovered a U.S.-specific coronavirus variant that accounts for about half of the cases in the nation! He has been featured on many major news outlets as more information about this mutation is uncovered. We were so honored he took time out of his busy schedule to talk to us and frankly he filled us wit...

This week we got to interview Dr. Erik, an anesthesiologist who was deployed in the Middle East when the pandemic broke out last March. His deployment had already come to a close but he was detained for a few more weeks before he was allowed to come back to the States. He's grateful to be reunited with his family again and we spoke and mused about many different topics like healthcare accessibility, Covid bubbles, and the reliability of masks. Because of his medical background, he went into deta...

After months of devastating loss, Louis said "fuck it" (literally) and enrolled himself in the Pfizer vaccine trial. Louis, a self-described "big ol' meat shield," was more than happy to take this risk, especially because he knows we aren't going to get anywhere with this virus until we start finding some answers. He goes into detail about why he chose to participate, how it went, and what happened after injection. If you want to find out whether or not he received the vaccine or a placebo, tune...

Last March Maria spent nineteen days in the hospital with COVID-induced double pneumonia. Can you even imagine? From the CPAP machine to rash and bed rest, she experienced the full gamut. We are so lucky she lived to tell the tale, no matter how gruesome it may be. We're even luckier she was so sunny and sweet at 6 in the morning when we captured this conversation...oh wait, it was six OUR time, 2 in the afternoon her time. Ohhh, no wonder she was in a much better mood than us! She also didn't n...