Out of Patients EP419: Sick Days Not Included: Rebecca V. Nellis
Rebecca V. Nellis, was never supposed to stay. She took a six-month temp gig at Cancer and Careers back in 2004 and never left. Twenty years later, she's still there. Still leading Cancer and Careers. Still fighting. Still wondering how the hell it’s possible that we still need to explain to employers that cancer isn’t a character flaw.
This episode runs long, because it had to. We go back to the yellow wristband days, before the Lance crash, when the “young adult cancer movement” was duct-taped together with rage and sarcasm.
She’s a Second City theater geek who hung up on Jon Bon Jovi (true story). She once staged live performances with Copernicus the performance artist, taught kids improv, and accidentally built a national workforce equity movement for patients, powered by data, legacy, and facepalming
We talk temp jobs, theater, identity, HR gaslighting, and what it means to build something you never planned to run. Also: Blazing Saddles, stage manager war stories, and why a good nonprofit feels more like Off-Broadway than Harvard Business School.
\She made me think harder about what matters, who gets left behind, and why some people stay in the work long after everyone else burns out.
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Producer
Matthew Zachary invented healthcare podcasting before podcasting was a thing. In 2007, fresh off building Stupid Cancer, he grabbed a mic, launched The Stupid Cancer Show, and started broadcasting patient stories on internet talk radio when everyone else was still writing blogs.
19 years and 2000+ episodes later, Out of Patients is still the most unfiltered healthcare show anywhere.
Matthew does not do softball interviews. Brain cancer at 21 taught him that time is finite and bullshit is expensive. He gets guests to say things they would never tell Congress. CEOs admit what is broken. Patients name what actually hurts. Scientists explain what industry does not want you to know. The conversations other shows will not touch because of sponsor concerns or political correctness.
What makes him different: he has been on both sides of the mic. Featured in documentaries. Keynoted hundreds of conferences. Published in The Hill. Now marching into Washington with a national patient constituency behind him.
But he has also been the guy puking from radiation, fighting insurance denials, and watching friends die from paperwork.
That dual perspective creates interviews you will not hear anywhere else. He knows which questions make power squirm because he has asked them from hospital beds and boardrooms both.
No pre-approved questions. No PR handlers. No seven-minute segments. Just real conversations with people brave enough to tell the truth about American healthcare.
Still the show where whistleblowers go first. Still the show … Read More
Out of Patients EP456: Fitz Happens: The Marvelous Fitz Koehler
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