Victorious - a Column by Brad Dell

For two decades, plummeting pulmonary function percentages terrorized me, weight flew from my body, and my diagnoses list stretched longer than a CVS receipt. Trips to the clinic featured grim reports detailing my body’s ruin: estimated organ expiration dates, fistfuls of prescription slips to counteract the destructive side…

I’m beginning to rethink the sources of my fatigue. Yes, sickness and physical activity are still real sources of exhaustion, but I’m realizing I’ve neglected a deeper flavor of struggle.   Many of us sick folk are familiar with the “spoon theory.” The analogy goes…

Every week, to confront old wounds and maybe even heal, I open my mind so my subconscious can push memories to the surface. I feel the emotions there, recall the senses, and meditate on how they drive me today. Then, I release them. Yesterday, I meditated on humiliating experiences, inviting…

Now, years past the worst of it all — you know, the health crises — I feel safe enough to ponder my trauma and its lingering tolls. Psychologists identify four trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze, fawn. The fight response triggers aggression, flight manifests as avoidance, freeze as inaction, and…

There’s a person I really like. (I’m her boyfriend, it’s nice.) And when I really like someone, I drop my defenses. We were discussing the building blocks of our identity, and I realized mine mostly derive from cystic fibrosis, deafness, and lung transplant. I wondered what it would look like…

I’ll confess an omission. I waited two months before telling the publishing company I worked for that I’d been struck deaf. The thought of losing my journalism career paralyzed me. I assumed my disability disqualified me from my dream career. How can a deaf person conduct interviews? I had…

I really did think it’d be my last Christmas. Sure, I was on the lung transplant list, but the doctors said I’d have to wait months before donor lungs became available. I was daily coughing up chunks of green gravel, trapped in a slow suffocation and ending each night wondering…

“It’s not very romantic, swaddled in sweaty, soiled hospital blankets. It’s slow, it’s ugly. And it could happen to anyone — anyone — and likely will if they don’t meet a sudden, violent end. People don’t like to confront the inevitability of sickness, nor the inevitability of death.” Professor…

When things fell apart, I screamed at God to glue me back together again. I’d been struck deaf, and putty clogged my lungs — airways literally gurgled when I inhaled. I puked several times daily between the panic attacks that ripped my mind to shreds. My whole body ached…

Out of 120 columns, my most controversial remains “Sugar Does the Trick, But I Won’t Let It Trick Me.” In the May 2018 piece, I critiqued the classic dietary advice that suggests people with cystic fibrosis should stack their diets with sugar to achieve rapid weight gain. I said…