Victorious — Brad Dell

I’ve often written that “the disease itself isn’t the worst part, rather it’s the …” The medication side effects, the childhood trauma, the dread, the blah, blah, blah. Today, it’s the social exclusion. Post-transplant, I’m not very excluded. Sure, I can’t eat sushi with my friends, and most…

At the start of November, I was infected with COVID-19. My heart rammed repeatedly and rapidly against my sternum, which had been broken four years earlier by lung transplant surgeons. I was dizzy, reeling from the local health department’s phone call informing me of my exposure to a person with…

Two months ago, I watched myself die, then get resurrected on television. Sort of. I used to interview fascinating people in Hawaii for local magazines. I’d never imagined I’d be profiled, much less through a documentary. But there I was, featured in a Bay Area NBC segment titled “…

People often declare my life to be stranger than fiction. (It’s true, and it’s both a blessing and a curse.) Usually, that observation is followed by an urging for me to write a memoir. I reply that I’ve tried, but simply don’t know how to end it. I can’t tie…

I should’ve died years ago, but I’m too damn competitive. A doctor said I’d cross my high school graduation stage in a wheelchair, toting supplemental oxygen. “Challenge accepted,” I thought. Weeks later, I walked with my head held high and unobstructed by oxygen tubing. When I lost my mind due…

I had imagined that everything would move at light speed once I got the call for my lung transplant. Instead, it was a peaceful wait of about 23 hours in the hospital. I pondered what I wanted my “last” meal to be (strawberry yogurt, nachos, rice), tried to be present…

In 2013, miles above the Pacific, flight attendants and passengers stared silently as a man yelled — literally yelled — at me for coughing too much. In meltdown mode, he didn’t care for my explanations that I have a noncontagious lung disease, nor that cough suppressants make me sick.

Life is hard, ain’t it? Sometimes all you need is a long cry session over hibachi in Toronto. And so that’s exactly what I had with fellow Cystic Fibrosis News Today columnist Lara Govendo. She has a mental health counseling degree, so she carries those good life-altering words. Over…

“I wish I had that problem!” If you’re pancreatic insufficient, you know what that dreaded joke is in response to. Gaining weight ain’t easy when your pancreas doesn’t function properly, your lungs and heart pump much too rapidly, and you’re slammed by side effects like appetite loss or nausea.

When feeling hurt or sad, I find my escape in rereading the books of my youth. They divert my mind from my woes and remind me that at least I’m not facing Voldemort or a clandestine agency bent on pulverizing civilizations. While scanning for a read in my e-book library,…

Many people think I’m reckless … and I guess I really kind of am. I blame a doctor for that. Years ago, I had a showdown with yet another infection that threatened to end my life, or at the very least — doctors said — threatened to force me into…

In my last column, I described how nearly dying made me a better person. That might imply that I flipped a brain switch to become a more rad version of Brad overnight, but that’s not how it happened. During my lung transplant journey, I strived to better my character,…