Victorious - a Column by Brad Dell

I was fully deaf, too weak to walk across my living room (I couldn’t reach my upstairs bedroom anymore), constantly coughing and vomiting, soaked in sweat and wheezing, too anxious to face friends, under my parents’ 24/7 supervision, without a job other than occasional editing for a local magazine,…

The night I received my first Hill-Rom Vest — at age 5 — was a fun one. It was a beast of a machine in the mid-1990s, a white box weighing maybe 50 pounds. Large, plastic, hollow coils connected the machine to a bulky, black vest, which fitted around…

There’s a rattle in my chest when I inhale. I sweat and dig my nails into my palm. I feel it, microseconds of dread and fear as the rattling gives way to something like the plugging and unplugging of suction cups in my airways. That quickly escalates into a “cough…

A dad at the church I attend came up to me and said his newborn daughter had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. He looked tired; his motivation for telling me was mostly to ensure that the situation wouldn’t be a cross-infection problem (it isn’t yet, due to…

Heard enough about “Five Feet Apart” yet? I know you’re begging to read just one more piece about it, right? I saw the movie about a week after its release and wasn’t planning to write about it. Certainly not about how ethically (and cinematically) good or bad the…

Note: I do not write on behalf of the entire CF community. No one does. This is about my preference. The most amusing, yet irritating, thing a person without chronic conditions can do to me is correct the language I use to talk about myself.

I shoulda seen it coming. (That’s what I always say in hindsight, once it hits.) Maybe I shoulda known when five people at church told me I look “really, really tired.” Perhaps the signs were there when I purchased five melancholy poetry books despite my crippled budget. Or…

We sat in pristine sands shadowed by titanic sentries dubbed The Twelve Apostles. At the southern end of Australia, I assume they guard against Antarctic penguins, like how The Wall in “Game of Thrones” defended against White Walkers. Maybe an invasion of penguins wouldn’t be bad. “I…

Imagine how much easier cystic fibrosis (CF) would be if we didn’t have fears. What if we stared death in the eye and laughed? Age 23 was destined to be my last year on earth. Hospital staff had that awkward talk with my family and girlfriend…

I gaze through a frosted window on a mountaintop near Lake Tahoe. It’s a church youth group retreat. The students play in the snow, sledding and laughing. I’m sipping Earl Grey while scrawling notes into a journal — combined with snowfall, it’s a recipe for sentimentality. I glimpse…