One of One — Advocating for Your Life in a System Built for Many
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“For the doctors, you’re one of 100. For you, you’re one of one.”
Keaton was thirty-five, living an ordinary life in Denver with his wife and two-and-a-half-year-old son, when a minor stomach ache sent him to the ER. Within days, he was diagnosed with intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma — a rare, aggressive cancer with a nine percent five-year survival rate, usually found in people decades older.
Keaton sits down with Cody for a wide-ranging, honest conversation about what it's like to hear "you'll be on treatment for the rest of your life" at thirty-five. He talks about the fear, anger, and grief that followed — grief for a future he hadn't even fully imagined yet — and the isolating feeling of living on Cancer Planet while friends carry on with ordinary life.
He also shares what it took to be heard: learning to trust his own instincts, pushing past oncologists who told him to wait, and fighting insurance for a targeted therapy that ended up working. As Cody puts it, "For the doctors, you're one of a hundred. For you, you're one of one" — and Keaton's story is a candid look at what it takes to advocate for yourself inside a system that wasn't built around any one person.
Join us for a conversation that explores advocacy, identity, loneliness, and what it means to want to be remembered well — plus Keaton's biggest goals for the year ahead: a liver transplant, and climbing Mount Rainier to raise $100,000 for cholangiocarcinoma research.
Follow Keaton's journey on Instagram and TikTok @keatonherzer. His breakdown of the Kafkaesque mess of insurance coverage is fascinating.
Keaton is our first guest of Season 4. Be sure to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform to get all the upcoming episodes including Cody's reflections between guests.
And join us over on Patreon for free to connect with a community of life-minded folks who are living life to the fullest: https://www.patreon.com/DyingToTellYou
For more information on the sponsor of this episode,
please visit the Iliff Death Care Collective.
>>Theme Music by Michael Shynes, "The Other Side"<<
Music featured in this week's episode (please follow and support these beautiful artists):
Jackson Rau, Vampire
Ziv Moran, Evergreen
Louis Island, I Know a Place
J. Lind, For What It’s Worth
