Plastic Bubbles

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.

Life is an Adventure

Does your life feel like an adventure?  That's what my friend's life coach asked her.  If it doesn't she said, you are doing something wrong.  

My friend asked me that question and almost without thinking I answered, "Yes!"   But now I'm mulling over that question and I'm wondering, what constitutes an adventure?  Is it something big, like taking a trip, or is it simply a break in your routine, like taking a different route for your morning walk?

And if you're always off on an adventure, how do you fit in mundane chores?  If you're always rushing around from one adventure to another, how do you achieve the stillness you need to hear yourself think?  

In order for your life to be an adventure, do you have to have an adventure every day?  Or do you save the adventures for the weekend? Or do you make life choices that result in exciting opportunities for the rest of your life?

For instance, for the last few years I have been telling David that I am dying to go to Paris and spend some time there.  His response was, "Well, get a job there and lets move there for a year." What the?!  That's all it takes to uproot this family out of our little suburban cocoon? The other thought we had was to go to China to teach for a year.  Can you imagine the learning opportunities that would provide for the kids?   Now that definitely qualifies as an adventure.

Part of me wants to move to DC to capitalize on my policy analysis background, especially after this past weekend's trip.  Part of me wants to stay here and let the kids have a hometown like both David and I did.  Can we stay here and still feel like life is an adventure?  

And how do you instill this sense of adventure in your children if you don't model it yourself? This weekend I met a young man in DC who had back-packed his way through Latin and South America.  He traveled down the Amazon on a raft with four other guys and a guide.  Who does that?  Someone who has grown up knowing there is a bigger world out there.  He is from a small town in Alaska (no, not Wasilla!).  My husband back-packed through eastern Europe.  He is from a small town in Wyoming.  Maybe that is the key.  Let kids grow up in a small town and they will be hungry to learn what else is out there...TTYL.