Speaking

At 28, Matt Cavallo had the life he thought he was supposed to have: a career underway, a wife he loved, a future that felt solid. Then he woke up one morning with numbness in his feet. Within days he couldn’t walk. Within weeks, he had a name for it: multiple sclerosis.

That was just the beginning. Over the following years, MS took his vision in one eye. It took his cognitive function for a stretch, memory and processing slipping in a way that felt, at times, like watching early-onset dementia happen to himself in real time. Facing the possibility of losing even more, he made a decision most people never have to make: he went on an experimental treatment that carried a real risk of a rare, fatal brain disease, because the alternative, doing nothing, felt riskier still. It worked. He stabilized.

He became a father. Then a father again. Not long after his second son was born, he broke his neck. If there’s a pattern to Matt’s life, it’s this one: something goes right, and something else goes sideways, and he keeps going anyway.

His career had its own version of that same pattern. He was building a career in real estate development when the market collapsed and the company folded around him, MS diagnosis and all. He pivoted into healthcare, going back to school for a master’s in public health while raising two young boys, managing a chronic illness, and recovering from a broken neck, all at once. He worked in hospital administration, then in healthcare technology, learning the systems and language of an industry he’d already come to know intimately from the other side, as a patient.

Eventually he went out on his own, writing and speaking full time. His first version of The Dog Story found an audience one talk at a time, and he built a business around it, driving to events across the country and selling more than 30,000 copies out of the trunk of his car. In 2016, MS hit again, a relapse that left the right side of his face paralyzed. He kept working.

When COVID hit, Matt made another deliberate choice: he stepped back from full-time speaking and writing and returned to healthcare technology, prioritizing stability for his family and time at home while his sons were still young enough to need him there, coaching their basketball teams, showing up for the years that don’t come back around. It wasn’t a retreat. It was the same instinct that got him through everything else: figure out what the moment actually requires, and do that.

Now, with his boys in high school and one headed to college, Matt has spent the past year rewriting The Dog Story from the ground up, turning it from an in-the-moment account of illness into a full look back at fifteen years of diagnosis, fatherhood, setbacks, and the promise that held it all together. He continues to work in healthcare, bringing two decades of lived patient experience into conversations about member experience, medication burden, and the human side of a system that too often forgets there’s a person behind every decision.

Matt has delivered keynotes and workshops for audiences including the Beryl Institute, Planetree International, the Patient Experience Symposium, Penn State Medical College, and Georgia Southern University, among others. His story has been featured by WebMD, U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, and KTAR. He is an award-winning author and one of the original healthcare bloggers, writing in public since 2008.