Victorious — Brad Dell

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 ……

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…

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…

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…

When I met Alexander, he was thin, his nose bled a lot, and he had tubes in his ears. I was a lonely first-grader fresh to Hawaii, and just as thin and malfunctioning as the brother I didn’t…

In the days after I got new lungs, I’d pray for the healing to move faster so I could get on with life. I’d stand in front of a mirror and stare at the transplantation scars…

Hi, my name is Brad Dell, and I have clinical anxiety disorder. Well, disorders. Three types. My generalized anxiety disorder is well-documented in my columns. It’s plagued me since sixth grade, beginning when I’d lie in bed at…

Bradley was a dramatic kid. I’d sit up in bed at night, unable to lie down because it made me cough, and wonder whether Prometheus ever became used to having his liver pecked out each day. I concluded…

“You need space at the table for five wheelchairs?”  The waitress’s eyes exploded from her skull, shocked to the degree I’d expect if I were to ask that she seat five…

It’s been almost three years since a port-a-cath infection nearly killed me. A fungal infection invaded my bloodstream and attempted murder, shutting down my organs and blasting me into a dimension of hallucination and suffering for days. When…

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,…

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…