Parents of a Sickboy

Parents. We all have them. Whether you know them or not, whether they are alive or dead, everyone has parents. The very fact that you are reading this means at some point in time two horny people got together had coitus (god, I love that word… Coitus) and a short while later, you popped out.

Now I’m a pretty lucky guy. I know both my parents. They are both very much alive and very much in love. For that I am pretty gosh darn grateful. My parents are a pretty big part of my life and I interact with them on a rather regular basis. We talk on the phone. We visit over dinner or drinks. We have cute/embarrassing interactions on Facebook. We have a very close and loving relationship with a strong sense of communication. However for some reason when it comes to my illness that communication has always been very formal. Very... basic bitch communication if you will. They will go so far in asking “How are you feeling?” or “Have you booked your next clinic visit” or “How was your last clinic visit? Any changes in your lung function” and for the majority of my life that has been basically been the extent of it. I’ve always wondered why that is. Of course, I’m not placing blame on anyone. I’m just curious, thats all.

In the first episode of Sickboy I discuss with the boys about how my parents never told me that Cystic Fibrosis was a fatal disease. I had to find that out on my own by reading it in a pamphlet, which in turn played a major role in how I ended up living my life and caused a lot of resentment towards my parents. Years after reading that pamphlet I still hadn’t talked to my folks about this pretty life altering fact. Hell we didn’t even talk about it after they realized that I had learned about the statistics of CF mortality. In fact we never ever really discussed that fact until this podcast came along, and even then it was in this weird indirect way. For some reason this podcast became the platform for which I could talk to my parents about these issues without actually talking to them. Instead I’d talk to Taylor and Brian about what CF means to me and how it’s shaped my life. I’d relate to other sick people and have these big realizations about life and death and how CF relates to those subjects. All of these things that we, as a family, never discussed were now coming to light for my mom and dad. We were, in a way, able to have the conversations we never had albeit one sided. They could not chime in and add their two cents. They’d just sit and listen while enjoying dinner on Monday nights. Until now. We brought them on show.

This week you are going to sit in on… well fuck… basically it’s our own little self guided family therapy session. We laugh, we (almost) cry, and we dive into stuff that has literally taken us 28 years to figure out how to talk about. This episode is deeply personal to me. I hope you enjoy it.

Jeremie

Listen to the latest episode over on iTunes