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Chronically Candid

Chronically Candid

By: Morgan Barrett
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Chronically Candid is a conversational, reflective podcast hosted by Morgan Barrett, a Millennial mom to twins and an adult living with cystic fibrosis. The show (formerly Makers, Dreamers, Doers) features open-hearted discussions with guests and solo episodes that explore topics like creativity, chronic health experiences, parenthood, personal growth, and everyday life challenges. Morgan’s aim isn’t to be an expert but to share lived experiences and foster learning, unlearning, and emotional flexibility. The podcast also includes monthly “Fireside Fridays” — brief readings of Morgan's poetry and prose — adding a cozy and personal touch to the series.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Episodes
  • From ECMO to Barcelona: Two Lung Transplants, Van Life, and Choosing Adventure with Caleigh Haber

    From ECMO to Barcelona: Two Lung Transplants, Van Life, and Choosing Adventure with Caleigh Haber
    13 Oct 2026
    This week on Chronically Candid, Morgan sits down with Caleigh Haber, CF patient advocate and consultant, speaker, and founder of Fight2Breathe, a rare disease advocacy platform reaching over 100,000 people in 30 countries. Caleigh was born with cystic fibrosis, lives with CF-related diabetes, and has been through two double lung transplants. Morgan has followed her story online for years, and this conversation is their first time meeting face to face.Caleigh opens with her CF story, from an active childhood full of gymnastics and cheerleading to a steep decline in her late teens and a double lung transplant at 20. She shares what happened eight months later on a celebration trip to Hawaii: DIOS, aspiration, heart and lung failure, and a medically induced coma on ECMO. She had to relearn how to walk, talk, and swallow, and she needed a second transplant in 2018.Morgan and Caleigh dig into the modulator era, where two people with the same disease can have vastly different experiences. Morgan shares that she and her two siblings all have CF, and Caleigh reflects on the decision of whether to start modulators at all, while already so sick, waiting for her first double-lung transplant. They talk about imposter syndrome and survivor’s guilt, and Morgan mentions comedian Kirsten Michelle Cills (see the Sept 15 episode), who touched on the same tension. They also remember Tiffany Rich, a fellow CF advocate and friend of Caleigh's who passed in May 2025.Caleigh gets vulnerable about how trauma still shows up, like the way a crackling fire can pull her back to being unable to move in her hospital bed, and how her family taught her to ground herself in the present. Now living in Barcelona after more than three years of van life across North America, she explains how she and her husband meticulously planned around her care to prepare for any health scenario, including a sepsis scare in Alaska, and the pride she feels about having built a consulting career on the skills she's developed through her lived experience.The episode closes with Morgan's three questions that she asks every guest, including what Caleigh wants people to understand about living with an often-invisible chronic illness: cancelling or going quiet is never a reflection of how she feels about you.Resources mentioned in this episode:Fight2Breathe.orgCystic Fibrosis Foundation — cff.org9/15/26 Chronically Candid episode with CF comedian Kirsten Michelle CillsMedical terms and medications mentioned in this episode:Meconium ileusDIOS (distal intestinal obstruction syndrome)CF-related diabetes (CFRD)ECMORinger's and D5: fluids Caleigh describes using at homeCFTR Modulators: Trikafta, Symdeko, Orkambi, KalydecoPeople mentioned in this episode:Tiffany Rich: Fellow CF advocate and friend of Caleigh's, who passed away in May 2025 from a rare form of bile duct cancerKirsten Michelle Cills: Standup comedian living with cystic fibrosisAvalon George: Author (Ivy Ever After) living with cystic fibrosisFollow Caleigh on Instagram at @fight2breathe. You can support Morgan’s work by reading and subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com and following her on Instagram at @morganbarrett__.Support my work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    1 hr and 12 min
  • Comedy, Mortality, and Rosanne Over Recess with Comedian Kirsten Michelle Cills

    Comedy, Mortality, and Rosanne Over Recess with Comedian Kirsten Michelle Cills
    15 Sep 2026
    This week on Chronically Candid, Morgan sits down with Kirsten Michelle Cills — Philadelphia-native standup comedian, terminally ill cystic fibrosis (CF) patient, oxygen-tank-toting road warrior, and the kind of guest who makes you laugh two seconds before she wrecks you. Kirsten has headlined clubs and colleges across the country, opened for names like Judy Gold and Laurie Kilmartin, and picked up Best of Best honors at both the Big Pine and Boston Comedy Festivals — all while living with a rare CF mutation so rare, she went undiagnosed until age 7.The conversation opens on that diagnosis story, then moves quickly into the thing both women know intimately: the reflexive habit of downplaying how sick you actually are. Kirsten traces her own version back to childhood hospital stays, where she learned that being the 'sick kid' meant managing everyone else's discomfort — a dynamic she thinks planted the seeds for becoming a comedian later in life. She and Morgan dig into the particular strangeness of the modulator era, where Kirsten's rare mutations mean she doesn't qualify for Trikafta, and how it's forced her into advocating in the opposite direction now — convincing people that no, she's not "fine," even as CF becomes more visible in pop culture and news headlines, often touted as the CF community's 'miracle drug'.Kirsten shares about her path to comedy: A BFA acting program, a class assignment that turned into a calling, and the grind of eight or nine shows a week that she compares to a blue-collar job — the confidence built entirely from repetition, from knowing exactly where the laughs land because you've clocked the data hundreds of times. Kirsten and Morgan talk about the particular vulnerability of being effortlessly open with thousands of strangers yet closed off to talking about emotions with the people who actually know her, the constant sense of urgency that comes from measuring your career in "years I might not have," and a recent breakdown on tour that cracked open just how financially brutal it is to build a life around a job with no PTO and a body that reliably lands her in the hospital like clockwork.There's also real tenderness here — on growing up without any community of other kids with CF, on therapy as a non-negotiable her mom insisted on since Kirsten was five, on the strange experience of being on the sidelines as part of 'the 10%' while the CF Foundation funds research for therapies that she may never benefit from, and on what it means to plant seeds in a garden you might never get to see bloom. The episode closes with Kirsten's thoughts on a possible future transplant, her dream of merging comedy with her genuine obsession with horror movies, and the three closing questions — including what she wishes people understood about chronic illness: That when someone with a chronic illness cancels on you, it is never the easy choice.Follow Kirsten on Instagram and follow her Horror Discussion Channel on TikTok. You can support Morgan's work by reading and subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack and by following her on Instagram.The Philadelphia Inquirer: For Philly's 'token terminally-ill stand-up comic' it's all fair game, including death and 9/11 Support my work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    1 hr and 11 min
  • From PICC lines to Fairy Tales: On Being "Lucky", Trikafta, and Storytelling for Your Inner Child with Avalon George

    From PICC lines to Fairy Tales: On Being "Lucky", Trikafta, and Storytelling for Your Inner Child with Avalon George
    18 Aug 2026
    This week on Chronically Candid, Morgan sits down with Avalon George — Minneapolis-based writer and author of the debut middle grade novel Ivy Ever After, out this October — for a conversation that feels less like an interview and more like two old friends finally getting the chance to talk. Before diving in, Avalon shows off her yearly vision board tradition (this year's made a few months late, post-holiday CF crash and all), and the two quickly bond over a shared observation: an awful lot of people with CF end up drawn to writing, as if all those hours spent doing vest and nebulizer treatments carved out the time — and maybe the need — to create.Avalon walks through her CF story from the beginning: diagnosed at one month old, a "pretty normal" childhood that included competitive dance, mounting hospitalizations, and a steep decline in college that included a professor stopping a lecture mid-sentence to check if she was okay. She and Morgan trade the particular, specific humor of chronic illness, like the "quota of appropriate coughing”. They talk about growing up as the eldest daughter, and in Avalon’s case, the strange experience of watching your younger sibling step into the older sibling role, and the complicated grief and pride of living with CF as a kid — wanting the attention at events like the Great Strides walk, but just wanting to blend in and be ‘normal’ at school.The conversation turns to Trikafta, which Avalon started right around her wedding, after what she calls her "rock bottom" — a hospitalization two weeks before the ceremony. She describes the surreal experience of "the purge," gaining back over a decade's worth of lung function within months, sleeping through the night for what felt like the first time in her life, and the strange sci-fi feeling of a body suddenly doing what it was supposed to do. Both women reflect on the identity split of a life before and after modulators, and the unsettling reality that access to a medication this transformative is still gate-kept by insurance companies, governments, and sky-high prices — a point neither is willing to gloss over.From there, the episode moves into Avalon's therapy journey: an unexpected OCD diagnosis, the realization that her childhood held real trauma even though she'd always thought of herself as “lucky”, and a particularly striking insight from her therapist connecting her recurring fear of the house burning down to the body being its own kind of home. Morgan shares her own parallel — recurring dreams of tornadoes threatening (but never fully destroying) her house — and the two dig into the need for control and the exhausting pressure of childhood "toxic positivity," where being anything other than grateful felt like betrayal.That thread leads directly into the origin of Ivy Ever After: a metaphor born in therapy, of CF as an unruly dragon Avalon had spent her life trying to leash and train. The book grew out of years of messy, cathartic first drafts, inner child work, writing classes, and a long, difficult querying process that ultimately led Avalon to self-publish. She and Morgan talk about what it means to write for the ten-year-old version of yourself, the privilege of getting to be nostalgic when survival was never guaranteed, and reclaiming childlike whimsy — Disney parks included — without apology.The episode closes with Avalon sharing about her discomfort with being called a "chronic illness warrior" — the way that language quietly implies choice, and blame, in outcomes no one actually controls — and how that tension became a central theme of her book's fictional prophecy.Resources mentioned in this episode:Ivy Ever After by Avalon GeorgeCystic Fibrosis Foundation (Great Strides walk)You can follow Avalon's writing and CF journey on Instagram at @avalon.writes, and connect with Morgan at @morganbarrett__.Support Morgan’s work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.comSupport my work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    1 hr and 22 min
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