Victorious - a Column by Brad Dell

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…

My message is simple: It is a systemic injustice, even ableist, to heap unbearable financial burdens on people with disabilities (PwD). Before I continue: This column doesn’t critique political parties or provide solutions; it raises red flags so others are mobilized to finding solutions. This column focuses on issues…

She seemed cool and collected when her big surgery date was confirmed. And the next day, Britt seemed better than fine — super, even. She was a blond blur of energy, a real firecracker, flinging jokes this way and that in her thick New Englander accent. I…

Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers of the film “Sound of Metal.” I yearn for the days I drew close, very close, to death. Each thought, emotion, and sight weighed heavy. And each breath was precious; who knew if there’d be another? I’d become deaf, and silence became…