Brad Dell is a Deaf 27-year-old with cystic fibrosis. He received a double-lung transplant from UC San Francisco in January 2017, then cochlear implants nine months later. He now lives in Hawaii, where he was raised. Usually he's traveling the world, chugging coffee, mentoring college students, or studying theology. Otherwise, he's working as the director of columns at BioNews, the publisher of CF News Today. (OK, he's still drinking coffee while he works.) He writes to undo the taboo surrounding lung transplantation. Catch him on Instagram at @coffee.cats_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…
Editor’s note: This column discusses suicide. Sometimes, the day is raw, a knife grinding round and round and round in my gut. The day also almost feels like fiction; a thing I’d prefer to fade into my life annals among the other bad things, mere pen strokes that have long…
A running joke among my friends is that “Brad hates kids.” Maybe I did. I could blame that on my obsession with having adult friends as a teen — in comparison to them, children seemed so naive. So yeah, people would always find me rolling my eyes…
I have a story for you. In my teens, I often ditched CF treatments to explore storm drains beneath my Hawaii suburban neighborhood. When entering the concrete tunnels (maybe 15 feet in height and width), they’re so dark it feels like you’re stepping into nothing, a vortex. Many…
On the night of Jan. 15, 2016, nurses rolled me in for surgery. I rolled out on Jan. 16 with a donor’s lungs. It’s been two years packed with awe. I love my post-transplant life. I’ve traveled all over, picked up new passions, and…
A friend sat with me above heaven, a sapphire ocean embracing two lush islands and the greater island beneath our butts — Oahu. On that mountaintop, I rambled about finding meaning in all things. Lanikai Pillbox Hike. (Photo by Brad Dell)…
It’s the happiest place in the world. Disneyland. I am afraid. Trembling, I slip deep down into the plastic seat molded into a massive seashell on wheels. The darkness of the man-made cavern is interrupted by a video on the ceiling that makes it feel like I…
I parked outside a library, where I’d planned to work for the day, at 7 a.m. in freezing 40-degree weather (I was raised in Hawaii). The library wouldn’t open for four more hours, and I was too tired to drive elsewhere, so I turned on my car’s heater…
The cystic fibrosis community gets buzzing at the news of a successful Vertex trial or when a well-respected researcher even casually mentions the word “marijuana.” When a trailer for a fictional romance movie about cystic fibrosis was released, our community was more of an angry swarm than…
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