Last night at dinner, my son spilled orange juice all over the kitchen floor and as he was cleaning it up, he got a nose bleed. Boy, was he mad! "I am bad luck today!" he shouted as he stormed off to the bathroom holding his nose with the paper towels he had just used to clean up the orange juice. A little while later, his sister accidentally hit him on the nose while they were playing and he got another nose bleed. "This is torment!" he shouted.
After he calmed down, I reminded him that people who don't do anything never get hurt or never get nose bleeds. "It's better to go through life with a few bumps and bruises than to always live life in the sidelines," I told him. His daddy chimed in, "You don't want to be the boy in the bubble." That was all it took. D wanted to know who this boy was and why was he in a bubble.
So instead of reading his bed time book, Peter and the Secret of Rundoon, we googled "the boy in the plastic bubble." I had heard about this boy but had never taken the time to learn his whole story. It is heart-breaking.
David Vetter's parents already had a healthy daughter but wanted very much to have a baby boy to carry on the Vetter name. They had had a boy already, David Vetter III, but he had died at the age of 7 months from an infection. He had been born with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). Going on the advice of three ambitious doctors who were doing research into a cure for SCID, the parents decided to have another baby. The doctors warned that this baby had a 50% chance of being born with SCID. The parents agreed to take that chance and their new baby boy, David Vetter, was born with SCID. Within seconds of the C-section birth, he was transferred to a sterile plastic bubble where he was expected to live until a cure was found. My guess is both the parents and the doctors thought this situation would be short-lived.
Unfortunately, they were wrong. That little boy lived in that bubble for twelve years never having felt a human hand on his skin until he was in coma as a result of failed bone marrow transplant from his sister. His mother was not allowed to hold him before he was put in his bubble for fear of infecting him. Can you imagine not holding your baby right after the birth? Can you imagine a life without human touch? The lack of human contact had psychological repercussions for him. He was assigned a psychologist early on to care for his emotional needs.
I cannot fathom wanting to have a child so badly that you would take a chance like that. What was the quality of life for that little boy? But it is easy for me to do some Monday-morning quarter-backing, we have been blessed with easy conceptions and three healthy children. I am more upset with the doctors who would ask these young parents for a baby for their experiment. That is a human life they were experimenting with! That couldn't happen today; could it?
N was so enthralled with this story that she even dropped her Fancy Nancy book and came over to read with us and look at the pictures. "Why did they put him in there, Mommy?" she kept asking. We tried our best to explain why anyone would do that to their baby. "That is very sad," she said. We all agreed.
D was very pensive. Then he said, "I'm glad I don't have to live in a bubble."
TTYL.
Photo: Courtesy of the BBC UK.
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