Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary

In 2020, Emily Mendenhall drove from Washington, DC to Okoboji, Iowa, a town of 800 that swells to 200,000 every summer, and walked into a pandemic that looked nothing like the one dominating national headlines. Inside gas stations and bars, masks marked you as an outsider. In one stop, a man told her family they would not be served if they kept theirs on. Her 6 year old daughter cried, confused.  

Mendenhall, a medical anthrop...

At 25, Jace Yawnick was building a career in health and wellness sales, chasing growth, status, and the usual young adult fantasy of getting somewhere fast. Then his body stopped cooperating. Fatigue turned into chemotherapy. The diagnosis was primary mediastinal B cell non Hodgkin lymphoma, and the rest of his life split into before and after.   

Now in remission, he talks about cancer the way people actually live it, not...

At 20 years old, newly arrived from Puerto Rico and trying to build a future in science, Benjamin Suarez Jimenez found himself sitting in front of two senior faculty members accused of plagiarism. He knew the material. He had done the work. His mistake came from failing to cite class notes during an exam because nobody had told him that was expected. In a matter of minutes, he watched what felt like his entire career flash before h...

Dr. Sarah Matt trained as a burn surgeon, working in a field where patients arrive with catastrophic injuries and survival depends on speed, skill, and resources. She left the bedside after confronting a limit that medicine does not like to admit. One physician can only see so many people in a day. The system surrounding those patients decides the rest. She moved into health technology, held leadership roles in startups, and built ...

In the late 1980s, a child exposed to fallout from the Chernobyl disaster lay in a hospital bed while doctors told his family there were no clear answers and no reliable path forward. Decades later, that same child, Yan Leyfman, walks into exam rooms as a hematology oncology fellow, expected to deliver clarity inside a system that still runs on delay, uncertainty, and institutional self preservation.

This episode traces the throughl...

Matthew Zachary is a brain cancer survivor, healthcare advocate, founder of Stupid Cancer and We the Patients, and host of Out of Patients. In April 2026, he returned to the stage at Merkin Hall near Lincoln Center for his first solo public piano concert in almost 22 years while launching his debut book, We the Patients: Understanding, Navigating, and Surviving America’s Healthcare Nightmare.

What unfolded became far larger th...

In December 1996, a 37 year old pharmaceutical executive sat in a Borders bookstore reading medical textbooks on the floor, trying to understand a disease she had never heard of. Multiple myeloma carried a three year prognosis. Her daughter was 18 months old. Her father had just died of cancer. Within weeks, she pushed her doctors to say the quiet part clearly. This would likely end her life before her child entered kindergarten.

Ka...

At 19, Shlomit woke up unable to speak. The right side of her body went numb. An emergency room sent her home and called it stress.  That moment did not end in a diagnosis that changed policy or triggered reform. It sent her into a decade long pursuit of understanding how the brain fails language and how the healthcare system fails patients who cannot advocate for themselves.

Shlomit trained as a speech language pathologist and...

In 2020, developmental biologist Dr. Crystal Rogers drove the country roads outside Davis, California crying between grant rejections, wondering whether she was about to lose her lab, her career, and the scientific future she had spent years building. She had already done what academia tells young scientists to do. She earned the credentials. She landed a faculty position at UC Davis. She built a lab. Then the real test began.

On th...

In 2008, Katy Talento walked away from Capitol Hill and into a Catholic convent. Within a year, she walked out. Within another decade, she sat inside the White House shaping health policy. Somewhere in between, she got labeled “infertile” after a single cycle of testing and spent years believing it.

That label stuck. The pain that came before it never got investigated. Doctors offered birth control and moved on. No one a...

In a wooded campground cabin in the early 2000s, 19 year old Ben Unger stood in the doorway and watched 20 naked men form a circle around a crying teenager. A counselor held up two tangerines and shouted, “These are your balls.” The exercise claimed to cure same sex attraction by forcing young men to “reclaim” their masculinity from overbearing mothers. Phones had been confiscated. Parents had paid thousands...

Drew Flugstad-Clarke never planned to work in brain cancer. She planned to play Division I soccer at Georgetown. She planned to paint. She even tried investment banking, answering emails at 4am in a cubicle that never slept. Then in June 2022 her father, Jim, was diagnosed with glioblastoma at 57. He died 1 day shy of 7 months later, just before his 58th birthday. His symptoms began with emotion, not seizures. A steady HR executive...

Janine Durso spent 30 years inside pharmaceutical advertising shaping healthcare narratives before becoming a belief strategist and founder of The Believist. In November 2024, during a routine Zoom coaching session, she felt what she called a sharp, terrible pain in the right side of her head. Within hours she was in surgery for a ruptured brain aneurysm. She does not remember the ambulance, the ICU, or the first weeks that followe...

Rebecca Benghiat holds a JD, passed the bar, and skipped corporate law to build mental health systems instead. She now serves as Chief of Staff and Head of Impact at Inner Foundation, where she helps direct capital toward emerging adults ages 18 to 30 and asks a hard question every day: Is this actually working?

In this conversation, she dismantles the myth of easy fixes. She explains why mental health measurement resists clean metr...

At age 12, Dr. Chrystal Starbird stood by a pond after turning her mother in to the police. She watched tadpoles and fish move beneath the surface and found a strange kind of order. Science became her refuge long before it became her career.  

Years later, she built that refuge into a profession. She now serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, studies structural biology tied to cancer and Alzheimer...

At 19, Jansher Naim went from sharp stomach pain to a Stage 4 fibrolamellar diagnosis that few doctors see and even fewer young adults survive. He pushed through 41 rounds of chemotherapy, a Whipple surgery, and months of isolation while his friends kept moving through normal college life. In the studio, Jansher sits beside his mother Sadia Siddiqui, who refused early defeat and helped overhaul his care team when the first plan off...

Jessica Federer built her career inside the rooms where science, money, and power collide. As the first female Chief Digital Officer at Bayer, she helped steer a 120,000 person global company through the rise of digital medicine while confronting a harder truth: women were excluded from U.S. clinical trials until 1993. 

In this conversation, she explains how decades of “first in man” research shaped drug development...

Monique Gore Massy spent 2.5 years cycling through New York City emergency rooms while her body shut down. Fevers hit 105. Her weight dropped from 122 pounds to 72 in 3 months. Hair fell out in clumps. No one ran an ANA test. Doctors blamed stress, old sports injuries, migraines. When a physician finally named it lupus, she added that she hoped it was not. Months later, Monique heard the words “get your affairs in order.&rdqu...

Teresa Baglietto has lived through the kind of compounded harm that exposes how thin the safety net really is. In this episode she walks through a life shaped by medical neglect, personal violence, and the exhausting labor of self advocacy. She nearly died after a C section when hospital staff failed to confirm she had urinated before discharge, spending 15 days hospitalized and separated from her newborn while facing the possibili...