Victorious — Brad Dell

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…