Brad Dell is Deaf and was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at 2 months old in 1993. He received a double-lung transplant from UC San Francisco in January 2017, then cochlear implants nine months later. He lives in Hawaii, where he was raised. Usually he’s traveling the world, chugging coffee, or devouring books. He also pastors Restoration Community Church and serves as the director of community content at Bionews, this site’s publisher.
I’ve been trying to write more. I promise. But my tacrolimus dose is pretty up there, and it’s getting on my nerves. Literally. Nerve pain from the medication, an immunosuppressant used in lung transplant management, has me…
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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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
Well, it finally happened: Twenty-two months after my double-lung transplant, I finally got sick for the first time. I gotta say, with a suppressed immune system, illness isn’t so lovely. I saw the…
The 2018 North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference (NACFC) in Denver was rad, huh? The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) is making great strides in the inclusion of patient voices, which has led to a selection of…
It’s World Mental Health Day! Well, it won’t be when you read this. But it is as I write this. I posted some confessions on Instagram about my struggles with mental health, and I…
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