Victorious — Brad Dell

His little ribs rose, then fell, then rose, then fell, then stayed still. The spark left his green, curious eyes — I swear it wasn’t a trick of the light. They were dull … dead. I loathed myself for letting my first cat be put to sleep without me by…

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” said Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore. He proceeded to describe bombing a hill, and how the resulting carnage “smelled like victory.” He then frowned and said sadly, “Someday this war’s gonna end.” Kilgore serves as the war addict archetype for the…

I’ve been bored during my six weeks of isolation. But sometimes boring is a synonym for peaceful. Yes, it’s been a peaceful time of silence and introspection. For example, in all my sitting around, I realized something really cool: I’m an amazing liar! I’m so good at it that sometimes…

A surreal winter, huh? Pandemic pandemonium. Over and over. “I can’t believe we even have to think about this stuff. COVID-19 is like fiction.” It’s real. I write this during week three of self-isolation. I ain’t scared for myself. This isn’t the first time I’ve defended against “biowarfare.” My…

I’m always promising people I’ll write a memoir … at some point. Once, I got 46,853 words deep before realizing that my writing style had evolved enough that, “Mmm, that draft is trash.” Recently, I gave it another jab. I leave my writing raw, still bleeding and unfiltered to depict…

I haven’t tasted much energy over the past month. Thanks to steroid withdrawal, I spend most of my time near home. It’s not all that bad, honestly, to sit around and do nothing. “Doing nothing” can be productive. I didn’t always feel that. Back in my pre-transplant days, I…

Since August, I’ve been irritable, in hermit mode (distressing for an extrovert!), a little depressed and unfulfilled, and having difficulty sleeping. Plus, I’ve been urinating about seven times nightly, which sounds funny but is a special kind of torture. Leading up to 2020, people shared diaries on Reddit tracking…

Loureen and I waited for our travel buddies to pass through airport security. Soon, we would be on a plane to Jordan, where we would provide various forms of support to Syrian refugees escaping civil war. Loureen, wise and a smidge or two older than me, looked me up and…

Six months ago, if I had been tied to a very uncomfortable chair and tortured for weeks while interrogators screamed, “What is your greatest fear?” the only things I could have come up with would have been maybe … centipedes. Or dying in a hospital bed. Or maybe that the…

I don’t write much about my work at Bionews Services, which publishes Cystic Fibrosis News Today. I guess doing so seems a bit awkward since I’m a senior director at the company. In my gig, I head the columns division, which publishes patient and caregiver voices across dozens of rare…

In my senior year of college, I wanted to be just like Dad. He’s a courageous traveler who has filled many passports and has eaten all sorts of weird foods. The problem was that traveling kind of scared me. No, it really scared me. It seemed like every plane…

My head is in the clouds right now. I took a heavy sleeping aid about half an hour ago, and wooh, that stuff hits fast and hard. The sleeping aid has become necessary some nights. I don’t know how to sleep when my phone keeps buzzing, buzzing, buzzing. I pick…