Sickboy

This film follows 29-year-old yoga instructor Jeremie Saunders as he lives openly with Cystic Fibrosis and looks for ways to remove the stigma attached to chronic illness and disease. Jeremie grew up in Halifax dealing with CF, with a daily routine that involves using an atomizer, and taking dozens of prescription pills. But he keeps a positive outlook and chooses to openly talk about his disease and its challenges. He was diagnosed as a baby. His parents were told he would not see his 25th birthday. He married his wife, Bryde, both knowing that the disease has left him sterile. The film traces the efforts by him and his two closest friends, Brian Stever and Taylor MacGillivray, to create Sickboy, an irreverent Internet radio podcast aimed at changing the way people view serious illness like cancer, depression and epilepsy. Jeremie believes that laughing about the absurdity of his own disease ‘takes away its power’. Driven by the fact that his family ‘never really talked’ about it, Jeremie becomes consumed by his attempts to change the conversation around serious illness. ‘I’m never going to have a kid. THIS is my kid.’ The documentary shows how a podcast that started as a joke among friends begins to have a transformative effect on its many listeners far and wide, and even on the podcasters themselves.