From Six Months to Tears of Joy | The Breakdown: PAH
Sickboy
CBC
4.8 • 524 Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2025
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When six months is the best a doctor can offer, hope feels like a cruel joke. In this Breakdown edition of Sickboy, we dig into Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH)—a rare disease that once meant certain death but now has science flipping the script.
Through narration and three candid interviews, this audio doc traces PAH’s path from despair to possibility. Jane shares what it’s like to have her lungs hijacked in her twenties. Dr. David Langleben, who built Canada’s first pulmonary hypertension clinic, walks us through decades of grim prognoses. And Jamie Myrah of PHA Canada explains why delayed diagnosis is still PAH’s deadliest trick. But then comes the plot twist: a new therapy called Sotatercept, a treatment that doesn’t just slap a Band-Aid on symptoms but actually targets the root cause. For doctors who’ve watched patients run out of time, it’s nothing short of a game changer.
The Breakdown is a new addition to the Sickboy’s format! An audio documentary where we crack open one illness at a time and make sense of it with heart, humour, and the occasional “WTF.”
Shout out to PHA Canada! This first Breakdown proves that even in the heaviest stories, hope still gets the last word.
For more information on how you can help please visit https://www.phacanada.ca/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's becoming pretty clear that U.S. President Donald Trump is ripping up the political |
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| 0:30.3 | This is a CBC podcast. |
| 0:38.7 | Hey, everybody. |
| 0:43.1 | I'm so excited for you to tune into this week's episode. |
| 0:44.6 | It's a bit different. |
| 0:46.1 | It's pretty special. |
| 0:47.7 | I won't ruin it. |
| 0:51.1 | I'll let you kind of figure it out for yourself as you move through it. |
| 0:55.5 | But before we get into it, I just want to plant a little seed. |
| 1:02.9 | This week we're going to be talking about a condition where time is of the essence. |
| 1:10.0 | And when you realize you may not have as much time as you expected, I mean, it changes your entire perspective. We've heard stories like that |
| 1:13.7 | on this show time and time again. So just for a second, before you dive into this week's episode, |
| 1:22.1 | imagine knowing that there's this new treatment. It could help you, but you can't access it. And unfortunately, |
| 1:31.9 | that is the reality for many people in Canada, especially people living with rare diseases. |
| 1:39.2 | On average, it takes about two years after Health Canada approves a treatment for it to reach its patients. |
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