With love, humor, and compassion, Debbie Galant talks about what it's like to live with breast cancer. What she learned along the way amounts to solutions for what can be a desperate, lonely experience.
From the first shock of her first diagnosis to sometimes wrenching, sometimes funny conversations with her doctors and family, Debbie gives us valuable lessons about how to survive and recover, physically and emotionally.
"You are pitched into this world of fear... this incredible world of fear," she tells us. "You're making a lot of decisions in that period, but you're really in a primal place."
Her journey includes how to "de-code" her oncologist, and learn from a nurse-navigator to dealing with her own emotional roller-coaster ride. She also talks about a vital ingredient: humor.
"Going into a doctor's appointment with a sense of humor, as opposed to a sense of dread, really helped."
Debbie, her husband Warren Levinson, and son Noah tell their story in the podcast, "Chemo Files" - is a deeply personal account of her months of dealing with cancer. She is Associate Director of New Media Initiatives and runs NJ News Commons at Montclair State University, New Jersey.
#27 America's Sleep Crisis: Jeff Koyen. How Do We Fix It?
If you have at least seven hours of interrupted sleep each night, consider yourself very lucky indeed. Problems with sleep are remarkably widespread.
Many millions of adults and children either don't spend enough time in bed or suffer from sleep disorders, resulting in illness, obesity, depression, mood swings and loss of creativity.
Our guest is Jeff Koyen, Editor-in-Chief of Van Winkle's, a new website "obsessed with sleeping, waking and everything in between. He shares the stories of scientists, artists, travel writers, child-care experts and many others who have a great deal to tell us about how we do - and don't - sleep.
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