The Sickboy podcast made the crowd laugh while maintaining a serious conversation about trauma and death on March. 6, in the Observatory.
Sickboy is made up of three best friends who grew up in Halifax together, Brian Stever, Jeremie Saunders and Taylor Macgillivary. They did a live podcast, interviewing Ashley, a car crash survivor.
Their goal is to break the stigma of sickness. Often it is the person who isn’t sick that has a harder time talking about illness and/or trauma than people experiencing it.
Saunders ended the event by telling the audience these conversations are so important… lets talk about the shit that matters and none of it would matter if it falls to deaf ears.”
Ashley spoke about her accident in depth, from her multiple broken bones, her nine months in the hospital, to how that landed her living in an old age home.
She went through hell and back, she said, and her experience was not for the light of heart. But Sickboy made the conversation light and open by maintaining tasteful humour.
“There is nothing funny about anyone dying but I challenge you, in the very least, to look out for the fact there has to be humour within the experience of living with cancer, there has to be humour in the experience of being human, otherwise what’s the point?” said Saunders.
“You don’t need a psychologist to be a listener,” said Stever.