A podcast for stroke caregivers and the medical professionals who support them. Hosted by Lana Wilheim — a registered nurse of 40 years and a stroke caregiver herself — each episode closes the gap between hospital discharge and real life at home. Honest conversations. Clinical credibility. The information no one handed you on discharge day.
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A hand on her shoulder. Four words she'd been waiting years to hear: You are not crazy at all. Before that moment, she had lost the use of her left side. Three male doctors had called her hysterical, suggested institutionalization, questioned her fitness as a mother. Then one female neurologist named it in 1993: multiple sclerosis. That diagnosis became the beginning of everything. Brenda Snow spent thirty years turning that moment into a mission. She built a patient engagement company across 220 disease states and four continents, grew it to over 450 employees, and wrote Diagnosed: The Essent
Someone said it felt like losing part of who they were, even though they wanted to be there every day. The identity shift nobody warns you about. The job you worked hard for suddenly doesn't fit the life you're living. The relationship changes but the person is still there. The grief comes anyway. Lauren Yankoff spent twenty-five years in senior corporate leadership at Victoria's Secret, Target, and Starbucks before stepping into one of life's most demanding roles: caring for her father as he lived with Parkinson's and Lewy Body Dementia. In this episode, she shares a framework that reframes c
There's a moment when the questions stop making sense. When you're living with someone twenty-four hours a day and nothing they do matches who they were, and everyone else sees them for seven minutes and says they look fine. The confusion becomes its own kind of grief—not the shock of the stroke itself, but the slow, daily disappearance of someone you thought you knew. Dr. J. 'Audie' Black is a board-certified neuropsychologist specializing in the invisible aftermath of brain injury, and he brings clarity to what families experience but struggle to name: apathy after stroke, caregiver burnout,
Someone woke up one morning and noticed their balance was off. Within hours, their world split into before and after. The room filled with people moving with organized chaos — urgent, precise, purposeful — and a loved one suddenly became a patient in a system designed to save their life in minutes, not hours. Jason Mayberry is the education director and stroke coordinator at Texas County Memorial Hospital, bringing 23 years of emergency medicine experience and 11 years leading an ER into the specialized world of stroke care. In this episode of Both Sides of the Bed, he breaks down what you nee
The moment the front door closed behind them, everything changed—not dramatically, but in the small, relentless ways that catch you unprepared. Each day brought something new, something the textbooks hadn't covered. No one had warned them that knowing medicine and living it were two entirely different things. In this episode of Both Sides of the Bed, you'll discover why so many caregivers ask the same desperate question: "Why didn't anyone tell me this?" You'll hear directly from someone who watched that gap between hospital discharge and real life, over and over, and decided to fill it. This
