Physics Girl spent her life explaining science. Then science couldn't explain her illness

Episode 53: Physics Girl Transcript

Ben Redlawsk: Hi, Dianna and Kyle. Welcome in. I'd love to get a quick mic check before we get started. Would you mind telling me what you had for breakfast this morning?

Dianna Cowern: OK. Avocado toast. Yeah.

Kyle Kitzmiller: I also had avocado toast that Dianna made for me, a fried egg and a fruit smoothie.

Julia Dixon Evans: That's an elite breakfast.

Anthony Wallace: That's pretty strong.

Evans: Yeah.

Wallace: That's pretty far above average for these checks.

Evans: Are we recording all of that? Could we just, like, start the episode with breakfast chat?

Wallace: We've done it before. Yeah, sometimes the breakfast reflects something deeper.

Kitzmiller: This one does reflect something deeper, though.

Wallace: Yeah.

Cowern: Yeah. The fact that I made it for you.

Kitzmiller: Yeah. This is new. Like her being able to actually do things around the house.

Cowern: It’s a big deal.

Kitzmiller: And help me out.

Evans: Back in early 2022, Dianna Cowern could never have imagined that making breakfast herself would be a big deal. Online she's known as Physics Girl and back then she was living her lifelong dream, sharing her passion for science with the world.

Wallace: Her YouTube channel had more than two million subscribers, and she was filming all over the world.

Cowern: Well, in case you're new here, I'm Dianna. You're watching Physics Girl, and earlier this past winter, I spent two nights on an ice camp 160 miles from civilization.

We went to the Arctic. We went to Death Valley and filmed a really, really cool and then really successful video there.

There are rocks in the Death Valley desert that move across the ground on their own, leaving behind bizarrely long tracks.

Evans: She interviewed the world's leading climate scientists, astrophysicists and theoretical physicists. She explained multiverse theories, solar flare super storms and the Big Bang.

Cowern: We brought our cameras inside the telescope Hubble used to discover the universe was expanding nearly 100 years ago. So it is going to get mindbending.

Wallace: She had full-time employees, a Physics Girl office and hundreds of supporters on Patreon.

Cowern: It was, like, the best days of Physics Girl, and we were having the best time as well. I joked with Levi. Levi is my editor, videographer and also one of my best friends. And I was like, Levi, I'm sorry, but this is my year.

Evans: But right in the middle of her big year, when the Physics Girl channel was at its peak, it suddenly went dark. For nearly five months, Dianna didn't post anything. When a new video finally appeared, it wasn't Dianna on camera.

Simone Giertz: Hi, it's not Dianna, obviously. Dianna's health has spiraled down to the point where she can barely move. In the past week, she has been to the ER twice.

Evans: Dianna's husband, Kyle, became her full-time caregiver while also scrambling for answers, and Dianna's condition only seemed to deteriorate.

Kitzmiller: She had a really weird thing where her heart rate would get really, really low. Like in the 30s. I put, like you know, pulse thing on her that would have an alarm if it went too low. I would, like, sleep, you know, waiting for this alarm to go off, and I just, every day, I didn't know if she was just gonna die.

Wallace: Dianna was battling a daunting health challenge that seemed to defy the way we think of sickness in the human body.

Kitzmiller: They said, you know, There's not a real disease here. But there was a really very real disease, and so we couldn't get the help that we needed.

Wallace: The thing that triggered Dianna's health crisis was a mild case of COVID. For her, basically a bad cold. So how did it get so dire, and how could she get better?

Evans: Before 2022, Dianna imagined distant galaxies and subatomic particles. When she got sick, the science that mattered, with life and death stakes, was what was going on in her own body, and there weren't many answers.

Cowern: There are places where science is incredibly useful and helpful, and then there are the boundaries of what we know. Like, this disease is beyond science.

Kitzmiller: Nobody knows what to do. The best scientist in the world doesn't know how to treat or cure Long COVID.

Cowern: There's so little that's understood about this disease, but I will say that everyone that has it is desperate to live again.

Evans: From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.

Wallace: And I'm Anthony Wallace.

[Theme Music]

Evans: Recently, Dianna did something that would've been unthinkable even a year ago. She and Kyle left her house and came to our KPBS studio to sit down with producer Anthony and me. Until now, she hasn't really had the energy or ability to go through her saga in a lot of detail, and we wanted to start at the very beginning.

Can you start with talking about when you first got interested in science?

Cowern: Yeah, definitely. I was a little nerd when I was younger. Like, when I was in high school, I would come home every single day, and I would do my math homework first, and then I would play the piano, and then I would be like, Why is the TV on? Because my parents were watching TV, and they're like, Oh, my God, our annoying little nerd who just wants the, like, the peace and quiet and the TV off so she can do her math homework. But when I took physics, I was like, Oh, this is like math, which I was good at, but, like, applied to the real world. And I loved that. I was like, these questions that we've been asking since we were kids, like, Why is the sky blue? Suddenly you have an answer. Like you know. It's, like, scattering of blue light, and I just, I loved that.

Wallace: It wasn't enough for Dianna to keep physics to herself.

Cowern: I wanted so badly to, to share my passion for physics with people, and my sister was a dancer, so it's so easy if your passion is, like, the performing arts to share that passion with someone else. But with physics, it's like, you're not gonna be like, Oh, come to my lab and watch me code and analyze data for eight hours until three in the morning.

Evans: But Dianna had an idea for how to make it happen. After she graduated with a degree in physics from MIT, she made an account on a burgeoning website called YouTube.

Cowern: My parents were like, So we helped pay for this physics degree at MIT, and you're doing what on the internet? I had a lot of jobs while I was making my YouTube channel. I drove for Lyft, had the pink mustache on the front of my car and everything. Then I worked at the Fleet Science Center and did science camps for girls after school, and I was working at GE doing software engineering. So I actually worked as a software engineer for a year. And I thought, OK, I'm gonna try to make a science communication career work for three years, and if I can't do it, then I'm going back to software engineering.

Evans: Science communication means taking scientific knowledge and experiments and translating it into something people can understand, can shape policy and even spark imagination. Think Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And from the beginning, Dianna was good at it.

Cowern: Inside your clicky pen is a science experiment waiting to spring forth.

Evans: She's funny, infectiously enthusiastic.

Cowern: It's magic. No, it's physics. Do it again.

Evans: And shares fascinating knowledge in a digestible way.

Cowern: Did you know that you could be older than your twin, like years older? According to Einstein's theory of special relativity, it's possible.

Wallace: Her audience was modest but growing, and just before her three-year YouTube experiment was up, she got her big break.

Cowern: My channel was actually discovered by PBS. And they were like, We'd love to fund what you're doing. We love what you're doing. And I was like, I love what you're doing. And that was the way that I got into actually doing this as a job, and I was able to quit my other jobs that I had at the time and then make this a career.

Evans: PBS gave Dianna's channel a huge boost. It was kind of like signing a major label record deal. Her video quality went from charming and homemade to polished and ready for TV, and she started doing all kinds of incredible stuff. She visited the world's largest particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland. She interviewed Bill Nye and filmed a ton of cool experiments.

Cowern: Subscribe to Physics Girl, and let's explore the world with physics.

Wallace: But she was also working nonstop, putting out a lot of highly produced videos, sometimes as many as six a month.

Evans: Her dream to share her passion for physics with the world had come true, but she was barely hanging on.

Cowern: I was so burnt out. There's this fear that if you stop for even a week or two or three, that you're going to lose your audience and they're gonna disappear. I really feel like it was like a treadmill.

Wallace: At the same time, the pressure of chasing more and more views and more and more subscribers was wearing on her.

Cowern: And I just found myself becoming so unhappy with that metric and unhappy following that as my measure of success.

Evans: So Dianna did the unthinkable. She got off the treadmill. She took four months off from making videos. She ended her partnership with PBS after five years, and she thought hard about what she really wanted.

Cowern: We came up with a list of, of our own metrics, and a lot of it had to do with did we have fun making this video? Did we learn something? Did we meet some interesting people? We had sort of a checklist of things, and that made the experience so much better.

Wallace: Like when you started letting that guide you, I mean, did your views crater suddenly, or did it help?

Cowern: No. Our videos started doing a lot better. Like, when I got sick was, like, the... What did they say the heyday?

Kitzmiller: The pinnacle? Heyday. You had a heyday of Physics Girl, right?

Cowern: It was.

Evans: Physics Girl videos started coming out a little less frequently, but for Dianna, they got a lot more fun and ambitious.

Cowern: We got to go to the Arctic, and we filmed in a nuclear submarine and took a drone to the Arctic and, like, I don't know if anyone's ever done that before because it's really, really difficult to film in that cold of weather with a drone.

But we were told drone batteries only have a few minutes out in the extreme cold. Some personnel even tried to use their own drone at the ice camp, and it just fell out of the sky. But we were determined. We just…

While we were filming with the drone, the ice that we were on was moving. So the drone was getting further and further away and wouldn't come back because we had moved so far out of its range. And then it finally flew full speed back to us, and one of the scientists with us, like, grabbed it out of the air, and we got our footage. We, you know, we were having experiences like that, and it was so, the experience itself was so much more fulfilling than how many views those videos got. I don't even know.

Wallace: Well, we checked, and that video from the Arctic has 2.5 million views. When she stopped obsessing over them, her views per video went from the hundreds of thousands to the millions. Some got up to 15 million.

Evans: The sky was the limit for Physics Girl. She was among the most prominent science communicators in the world. She landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. She was about to go on tour. She had worked so hard and taken risks, and her channel and career was becoming just what she wanted. She seems so happy in those videos, and that was real.

Wallace: And things weren't just going amazing for Dianna professionally.

Cowern: We got married in May of that year back on Kauai, and we had, like, a week-long schedule of activities for our friends, and a lot of them came and stayed for all of it. So it was, like, one of the best experiences of my life. And we'd been talking about it for a long time, where we wanted to go to a different country for two months of every year, and we wanted to spend one month just exploring and then one month working from there and maybe collaborating with some scientists that lived there. So we went to Scotland for our honeymoon, and this was gonna be, like, the first version of that dream.

Evans: So Dianna and Kyle set off for their first international adventure as newlyweds. Soon after arriving, that Scotland dream hit what seemed like a minor snag. Kyle and Dianna both got COVID.

Cowern: So I had, you know, the typical symptoms, like a sore throat and a cough and a stuffy nose, and it was like, it was like a bad cold, but it wasn't anything alarming.

Kitzmiller: We both caught the same illness.

Cowern: Yeah.

Kitzmiller: I was worse off during that time than she was.

Cowern: Yeah.

Wallace: They both recovered, although Dianna felt like she had some persistent fatigue, but she wasn't gonna let that slow her down.

Cowern: And so three weeks after I got COVID, we were supposed to go on this incredible 100-mile hike called the West Highland Way. And we had been planning this for months and months. I’m so excited about it. And for the first two days, I hiked, and I got tired, but then I would rest, and I'd feel recuperated. And I got tired, and I'd rest and feel recuperated. On the third day, I started hiking, and I would rest, and I didn't feel recuperated. And 30 minutes went by, and I still felt horrible. And an hour went by, and I still felt horrible. And I was like, I can't do this. I can't walk anymore. I got in a cab and went to the next location while Kyle hiked it by himself, and that was, you know, the beginning of you doing a lot of things by yourself without me.

And, and I just, I never recovered. That was my first experience with a crash, and all my symptoms got worse, and I was totally out of it. Like, brain fog like I'd never experienced before. I couldn't walk. I couldn't think. I had nausea and headaches. And I still to this day have not recovered.

Evans: And did you have any sense in that moment that it would last anywhere near that long? Or were you still feeling like, 15 minutes and I'll be back? You know, like…

Cowern: Yeah, no idea. No, not a clue of what was to come.

Kitzmiller: Long COVID was not something that you would just hear about. I had never heard of it. Just like the idea that you could get sick, kind of get better, but then never be the same again. This idea was a completely foreign concept.

Evans: They packed up and brought Dianna back to San Diego. The idea was to get more rest, see doctors and specialists, and try to figure this thing out. But Dianna only got worse.

Cowern: I just deteriorated. I was nonverbal, so sensitive to light and sound that I was spending every single day in a dark room with noise-canceling headphones on and dark glasses on so that I could take away every environmental stimulus because everything was too much for me. People's voices whispering, the door creaking as it, as people came in. Like everything made me feel like I was having this painful adrenaline rush.

Evans: What was going on inside your mind? Like what was thinking like for you?

Cowern: It was hard. I had so much brain fog that I could not think. Like you're just incapable of thinking. I made up this fake island in my head. So I would visit this like fantasy magical island, and I had these characters, and I would go there, and I would visit that a lot because I was lying in bed for twenty-four hours a day with my eyes closed, and the only time I opened them was to eat or, like, to check my watch. I couldn't use my phone. But sometimes I was not well enough, and I didn't have enough brain power to even go there. So that was like a good day, was getting to go visit my island in my mind.

Kitzmiller: I had to become a caregiver, which was…

Cowern: A full-time job.

Kitzmiller: Yeah, full, full-time job. Every meal, every time she had to go to the bathroom, getting prescriptions, things like powers of attorney so that I could actually make decisions for her. The other aspect of that time was Dianna was so sick that I didn't know if I gave her, like, a cold, would she die? 'Cause she seemed so close to death already. And so I wasn't seeing people in person.

Cowern: I'd never experienced anything like it. I don't think most people have. And I was like, my life was so amazing leading up to this, and it was so incredible, and I was so grateful for everything that had been going on. And then just boom, like everything got taken away.

Wallace: Eventually, Dianna was diagnosed with diseases better known by acronyms. There was ME/CFS, which stands for myalgic encephalomyelitis and chronic fatigue syndrome. That's what wiped her out after her hike. It can cause debilitating crashes after exertion. And on top of this, she developed MCAS, or mast cell activation syndrome.

Cowern: Which is like an overreaction from your body to foods and medications, even heat, and stress, and lack of sleep. Like, it's just your body has this, like, allergic-type reaction to things.

Evans: The problem with these diagnoses is that they are poorly understood by our current medical system. Many doctors have no idea what causes these conditions or how to help patients suffering from them. A lot of people say they feel dismissed, being told it's all in your head.

Coming up, Dianna and Kyle wade into uncharted waters, confronting a disease that's beyond the grasp of the top experts in the world. Stay with us.

[Music]

Evans: When Dianna got sick, she and Kyle were at a huge advantage. They had serious cache in the scientific community. I mean, Dianna was on a first-name basis with Bill Nye.

Wallace: And Kyle, who had recently quit his job to work full-time for Physics Girl, was able to dedicate his life to trying to help Dianna get better. So early on in Dianna's sickness, he was able to get in touch with some of the most knowledgeable people in the world on Long COVID, and he pretty quickly figured out they couldn't help much at all.

Evans: When Dianna told us what made her fall in love with physics, part of that was how it gave us answers. Why the sky is blue, why an apple falls from a tree. When it comes to Long COVID, science is still looking for those answers.

Kitzmiller: We don't have the full knowledge of, you know, the pathophysiology of the disease, what's causing it, what systems in your body are, you know, malfunctioning and why. We just don't have enough information to be able to look at someone with Long COVID and say, We have to fix this, this, and that, and you'll be better. People will say, maybe think, Oh, why don't you get, you know, medical help at this point? And we did.

Cowern: We tried.

Kitzmiller: Yeah, we went to the- Yeah. I mean, we tried. We went to the emergency room twice, and both times they sent her home. And they said things like, Oh, we don't treat mast cell activation syndrome. You know, we don't treat anything to do with that. You know, when someone is as sick as Dianna was and the doctor comes back in and says, We ran a bunch of tests, everything we could. The good news is we couldn't find anything wrong with you, that's the opposite of good news. It means that they have no idea what's going on.

Wallace: This experience of having devastating, unrelenting symptoms unlike anything you've experienced before, and having doctors completely unable to help or even find anything wrong, it's actually very common in the U.S., more common than you might think.

Evans: And it doesn't just happen with Long COVID. There's a cluster of other similar chronic conditions that wear people down and elude treatment or even diagnosis. These illnesses can range in severity, and Dianna's case is extreme. For some, it can also be what's considered an invisible disability. There is no good data on just how many people go through this kind of poorly understood and rarely acknowledged sickness. Estimates vary from around 10% of Americans to as many as 25%. That's tens of millions of people, and one of them is Anthony.

Wallace: I can relate to a lot of what you're talking about.

Cowern: I'm sorry.

Wallace: I never was debilitated to the degree that you were, thankfully. This was a while ago. It was when I was 18, so it was in 2011. One night, right before I was about to graduate high school, I started to feel, like, a weird pain in my chest. And then the following week, just like, all this crazy stuff have happened. Just, like, dizzy and really tired, numbness in my limbs. And for me, it was, like, three years of what you described, where you go to the doctor and they tell you you're fine.

Cowern: Yeah.

Wallace: And then, like, what you're talking about, where you became kind of, like, an expert in it.

Kitzmiller: Yeah.

Wallace: That was, like, my mom.

Kitzmiller: Oh, wow.

And then she actually went on to become a naturopathic doctor, like, as a result of it.

Kitzmiller: Wow.

Cowern: Interesting.

Wallace: So it's kind of like my mom and I doing, going through it together.

Kitzmiller: Yeah.

Cowern: Yeah.

Kitzmiller: Amazing.

Wallace: Oh, and I was eventually diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease.

Cowern: Which is very, very similar to ME/CFS.

Wallace: Yeah, I think there's a lot of similarities. I think it's really interesting to think about how all these diseases are related and what that could tell us about the body and illness and disease.

Kitzmiller: One of the things I found talking to so many patients who had Long COVID and ME was the symptoms are remarkably consistent. Like, when you see someone with a post-infectious illness, once you're familiar with it, it is so stark. You're just like, Oh, yes. You have it.

Cowern: Yeah.

Kitzmiller: Like, the constellation of symptoms, doesn't matter what your initial infection was, they're so similar.

Evans: When Kyle says post-infectious illness, he's talking about this broad category of poorly understood chronic illnesses. They're also called infection-associated chronic conditions. These start with some kind of infection, like COVID, or Lyme disease in Anthony's case.

Wallace: Most people are back to normal in a couple of weeks, but for others, for some reason, the infection throws their body off-balance in all kinds of unpredictable ways. Often, they stay sick for years, or even decades. For me, it's been 15 years, and the symptoms come and go in waves. The biggest things are brain fog and fatigue and achiness. Overall, I live a fairly typical life. I go to work, I play adult recreational softball, I'm in a band and I've found treatments that have helped me a lot. But there are stretches, sometimes for months at a time, where it's hard to just get through the day. I'm very good at powering through not feeling well. Most people just have no idea.

Evans: Exactly how or why this happens to Anthony or Dianna or those millions of Americans living with post-infectious illness, nobody really knows, and the medical system hasn't handled that uncertainty very well.

Kitzmiller: We can talk about, you know, the insurance giving fifteen minutes to have a complex disease patient and, like, overworked doctors and all this kinda stuff. I mean, the institutions of medicine are a complete mess, and so you can't understand Dianna's disease in fifteen minutes, right? If a physician is not able to understand the symptoms that she has and attribute it to, like, a physical cause, then they're not going to prescribe a medication. They're not gonna be interested in trying to help her, and that is what we encountered. And so I think to me, that's the biggest kind of blind spot in medicine is the inability to give truth or give space to a patient's lived experience if it doesn't match up with a preexisting medical condition. If we go and we look at ME as a disease, we've known about it quite clearly for over 100 years at this point. And to step back and acknowledge that any time somebody gets sick, they could end up with this kinda horrific disease, is just something that's really emotionally hard to do. We don't wanna imagine we treated patients poorly for that long. So I think science has had its eyes closed to the disease, to post-viral illnesses, post-infectious illnesses for a long time.

Wallace: When conventional medicine and science offer no answers, you're forced to either keep suffering or look elsewhere. It's not really much of a choice.

Cowern: I've been raised as a little scientist and, like, I really believed that alternative medicine to me, and s- to some extent still, is, like, questionable and dangerous at times. Like, fringe has a pretty bad connotation. Like, fringe science and fringe medicine, but, like, that's where we've had to turn because there's no alternative.

Evans: Kyle turned to places like the Bateman Horne Center, a nonprofit research institution that studies Long COVID and ME/CFS. They publish a list of treatments that have shown promise to others and to Dianna.

Cowern: I always sort of like to caveat when I talk about what worked for me, because a lot of people who have this disease are so desperate for treatments, and there are almost none that are approved, or there are none.

Kitzmiller: There are none that are…

Cowern: There are none like approved for the treatment of Long COVID. Yeah. Wow. What works for some people might not work for other people, and also, I've tried many treatments that have made me worse.

Wallace: Dianna doesn't want to be the reason somebody gets worse from any particular treatment. But for her, a couple of seemingly bizarre things ended up being life-changing, and she doesn't definitively know exactly why and how they worked. Every case of post-infectious illness is its own mystery and puzzle.

Cowern: I started taking a medication that supposedly reduces brain inflammation, which is actually something that people with schizophrenia take.

Kitzmiller: Yeah.

Cowern: But I take a low dose of it. So I had been bed bound for about a year already, and that was the first turning point to where I could start using my phone again and start speaking again. Listening to music, which was amazing. It's just incredible. It's magical. And I was so, like, desperate for music that when Taylor Swift's new album came out, I read her lyrics on my watch. And I was like, when I finally got to hear what they sounded like, I was like, Oh, they're OK.

Wallace: It was better when you could imagine.

Evans: Taylor Swift on your island.

Cowern: Taylor Swift on my island.

Evans: The other game changer for Dianna was something called a stellate ganglion block. It's an injection of a numbing agent into a particular bundle of nerves in your neck.

Cowern: And that's meant to interrupt the fight or flight response of your nervous system. And it was about four to six weeks later, I started to improve, and then everything improved, and I was able to start eating more than seven foods, which is what I was eating for a year, a year and a half. I was eating pistachios, apples, squash blended together and drank it through a straw because I couldn't chew.

Kitzmiller: It was so gross.

Cowern: It was horrible.

Evans: I'm like, I like those things separate.

Cowern: Yeah.

Wallace: It's like baby food.

Cowern: It was like baby food.

Kitzmiller: Yes.

Cowern: Yeah.

Evans: Dianna was lucky. She had Kyle to take on her illness as a full-time job, and they had the resources to pay for expensive treatments, basically none of which are covered by insurance.

Cowern: A lot of people that get the ME/CFS version of Long COVID do not ever get better or they improve, but they maybe have relapses, you know, five or 10 years down the line. And I would say I'm at maybe like 30% or 40% capacity right now. And that's about as good as I've been since that crash right after my hike.

Evans: Wow.

Cowern: And at my worst, I would say I was at maybe 1% or 2% of my full capacity.

Wallace: But in recent years, things have improved for people with Long COVID and other post-infectious chronic illnesses. Awareness has never been better, and treatments are being studied, thanks in part to people like Kyle.

Kitzmiller: I'm actually really proud to be part of the patient advisory committee for the Stella Ganglion Block clinical trial. After I saw Dianna get healthier with it, I formed a team and started to fundraise for a clinical trial. We've been working with the NIH for the past year, and that trial is about to start recruiting. They're also doing a trial on baricitinib and tirzepatide, which is like a GLP-1 type drug. And there's one more, oh, low-dose naltrexone. But if we get treatments that work and we can show that they work, that is going to guide science a lot faster than any sort of lab research that we can do and help people so much faster. The other good thing about doing clinical trials and even applies to the four of these is if they do pick up a signal, then insurance will start to cover those treatments for patients with Long COVID, hopefully.

Evans: For years, Dianna's online presence had been reduced to mostly just health updates with Dianna in bed. But a few months ago, she posted to her YouTube channel again, the first bonafide Physics Girl science video in three years. She talks about neutrinos and the sun, mindblowing stuff that's very far away from her darkened bedroom.

Cowern: Guess how long it takes for light to get from the center of the sun to the outside of the sun. You ready for this number?

Levi Butner: What?

Cowern: Hundreds of thousands of years.

Butner: What?

Cowern: Yeah.

Wallace: In the comments, her fans rejoiced. Quote, "Probably one of my most anticipated notifications of the past few years," one said. Another, "My daughter just ran through the house like Paul Revere announcing Physics Girl has a new video."

Evans: Dianna still crashes when she pushes herself too hard. She crashed after she made that first science video in three years. Her recovery is a roller coaster. So we asked her if our long interview might be too much.

Cowern: To be perfectly honest, like, this has been a long time of chatting for me, and it, I will probably crash from it, and, like, I think that's something that a lot of people don't see is, like, I'll appear on something, or I'll make a video, and they don't see the crash afterwards. But I think, you know, it's an opportunity to say, like, I will probably crash.’ But that's something that I'm willing to do because I want to live.

I've discovered through this whole process what's the most important to me in life because it's what I missed the most when my entire life disappeared, and that is connection with people. And this is like, this is part of it, too, like, getting to meet you guys and chatting and tell our story. So thankful because this is like, this is food for the soul that's the deprived soul.

[Music]

Evans: Special thank you to Dianna Cowern, Kyle Kitzmiller and our own producer Anthony Wallace for sharing their stories and expertise for this episode.

And thank you so much for listening. If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, leave a rating or comment. It makes a real difference and helps stories like these reach more people.

The Finest is a production of KPBS Public Media in San Diego. I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer is Anthony Wallace, who also composed the score. Ben Redlawsk is our engineer, and Chrissy Nguyen is our editor. This episode was written and researched by Anthony and me.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.