Being isolated at home can be rough on a person, and now many of you viewers know that from
firsthand experience.
But imagine if you had to spend your entire life in quarantine?
Imagine if every day invisible pathogens threatened to take your life away...pathogens that were
harmless to other people because they were naturally protected against them.
You are a special case indeed, and there will be no contact or cuddles with other people
for as long as you live.
You’ll never feel the touch of another person’s skin...not even your own mother’s.
You are a walking time bomb; the very planet is your predator, the air is pervasive with
invisible threats that lay in wait to finish you off.
Welcome to the life of a bubble boy.
The bubble boy we are talking about was named David Vetter.
He was born September 21, 1971, but he wasn’t his mother’s first child.
That first child died after seven months, and the reason was because he was born with
something called “severe combined immunodeficiency”, or SCID.
We’re going to get into details later about what that actually is, but first let’s get
back to the story of David.
After those parents lost their first child to this very rare disease they were told that
if they should have another child, there was a good chance it could also be born with SCID.
The couple already had a healthy girl, and so they thought they’d go ahead and try
to have another baby.
As soon as baby David came out of his mother he entered his world of isolation.
He was under attack from the moment he was delivered, and so had to be confined inside
a specially made cocoon bed that had been sterilized.
This was now David’s world, although in the years to come that cocoon would get larger
of course.
If David had not been cocooned, within months his body would have become infected by various
diseases, and those would overwhelm and kill him.
The outcome wasn’t good for SCID kids.
But David didn’t give up the ghost easily.
He grew up, was able to walk and talk, but his entire life would be inside a chamber.
He was never hugged, like all children should be.
He didn’t get to go out and play, or go to school, so you might be wondering just
how he survived when he could have no contact with the outside world.
How did the poor guy even eat?
Ok, so first a 101 on what David had and why he had to literally live in a bubble.
Severe combined immunodeficiency…what’s that?
It doesn’t sound too good.
As you can probably guess, it means that a person is born with virtually no immunity
to anything.
You see, you guys watching this show might not know that inside you there is a battle
going on.
You have soldiers on your side fighting for you all the time, night and day, 24/7, until
the day you bite the dust.
This immune defense system of yours is your heavenly protector, your biological knight
in shining armor, because when it detects foreign agents, let’s call them enemies,
it defends you against them.
These invading pathogens are detected as the enemy and so your immune system responds.
This is happening all the time, but sometimes your defense system has to put up a fight,
and you might feel quite ill.
Sometimes you don’t win this battle, and that’s you gone, dead, you’ve “popped
your clogs” as the British might say.
That’s why some folks with compromised immune systems might not fight infections off very
well.
We’re speaking in layman’s terms here of course, ‘cos this is not a show about
biology.
It’s a show about David.
You see, David wasn’t born with this in-built defense system that you have.
He wasn’t just what you might call a sickly child…he was virtually under attack from
everything that existed in the world.
He didn't have a compromised immune system...his entire army was MIA.
Our world, you see, is full of microorganisms, and some of these can hurt us, organisms we
call pathogens.
That word basically means “disease-producing”.
They are everywhere, and you are completely fudged if you can’t fight them at all.
That’s why David had to live in a bubble.
But how did that go?
Well, all the time David was in this bubble, his parents hoped and prayed he could have
a bone marrow transplant, but he needed the perfect match.
Getting that wasn’t easy, so he had to maintain this life in his bubble.
His sister was his great hope at first, since it was thought her bone marrow would be the
right fit, but unfortunately it wasn’t.
You see, if a transplant is successful the body will produce white blood cells and then
the immune system will kick in, so David just had to wait.
Meanwhile, this is how life in the bubble was.
He needed to eat and drink of course, but anything sent into that bubble had to be sterilized.
You might ask, how do you sterilize a cheese and ham sandwich?
Well, there were holes in the bubble, so as a kid, nurses could wear gloves and spoon
feed him.
He ate only food from jars and cans and that food had to be sterilized.
Everything that went in that chamber had to be sterilized.
There were no sandwiches, unfortunately.
The process of sterilization didn’t involve just wiping stuff down with alcohol or detergent,
but putting all items in a special chamber and then pumping that chamber with ethylene
oxide gas at a high temperature.
The item would then be aerated for one to seven days and then it could be put into David’s
bubble.
So, he had food…he had toys…he had a TV…books…you name it, but all these things had to go through
this sterilization process.
The guy had to breathe of course, so air was pumped into the bubble.
The problem with that was the generator was really noisy, so talking to David could be
hard, not to mention how he must have felt with that constant noise in his life.
In time, he did at least get amplifiers to make communication easier.
His parents gave him an education.
They showed him love, but in a non-contact kind of way.
His sister even slept next to the bubble, so David always had company.
He’d even fight with her at times, as siblings tend to do.
One time he reached out of his bubble with his gloves on and tried to punch her.
He was too slow to make contact, something that irked the confined child.
It was hard for the boy..
He couldn’t go out and play like the other kids.
There was one instance when his sister announced she was going to get a burger from the local
fast-food place.
David shouted, “I want to go.”
He thought for a while, and said, “No, I don’t.”
He spent a lot of time at hospital and a lot of time at home, so you might be wondering
how he got from place to place.
His bubble was too big for a car, or a van, and just a short trip outside of a bubble
would have killed him.
Well, he had a transport bubble, and he even went to the movie theater in it once and watched
“Return of the Jedi.”
Better still, when David was six, NASA made him a kind of spacesuit, albeit one connected
to his bubble with a tube.
He got to walk about a bit and feel a little more human, but it seems he didn’t quite
like it and after about seven times in the suit he just said he didn’t want to wear
it anymore.
As he got older of course he matured in his mind.
At eleven years old he was no longer a little kid but a big kid, and seeing as he was always
on TV he became aware he was a bit of a star.
Was that a good thing, though?
Some people think it wasn’t, because his life was a bit like “The Truman Show.”
In fact, while he always smiled for the cameras, we now know he sometimes went into fits of
rages when they were turned off.
He didn’t want to be a goldfish in a bowl, a kind of weird roadside attraction for millions
of Americans.
The kid matured and he wanted out, but there was no way out.
“Why” he would think, “has life dealt me this awful hand?”
We should say, there had been boys in bubbles in the past, but never had someone got so
old in a bubble.
The bubble was no place for a teenager, and so when David was 12 he was finally given
that bone marrow transplant he so direly needed.
The doctors decided to try a new technique and give him a bone marrow transplant that
wasn’t a perfect match.
His beloved sister was the donor, and in October it happened.
For four months David seemed ok, although still in his bubble.
Things quickly went wrong, though, because his sister had passed a virus on to him, the
Epstein-Barr virus.
Most of you might have this virus in you, but it lies dormant.
At the time, the doctors couldn’t screen her for this virus.
It attacked David and he couldn’t fight it.
Infections overwhelmed his body and he ended up falling very ill from a cancer of the lymphatic
system.
He spent two weeks in the hospital, finally freed from his bubble.
Experiencing the real world, touching the skin of his family, able to breathe real air,
to finally live without the hum of a machine in the background.
He actually asked for a Coke, something that couldn’t be sterilized for his bubble life,
but the doctors refused him on the grounds it wouldn’t help his condition.
But he kissed his mother for the first time in his life…she would sit down beside him
and comb his hair, an experience that was both sad and wonderful.
He was out of his prison, but fading fast.
He was truly alive at least, but not long for this world.
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had finally done him in.
On Feb. 22, 1984, he was still conscious but he knew his time was coming.
He made jokes that morning, but as if an angel had whispered in his ear, he winked at his
doctor, closed his eyes, and slipped into unconsciousness.
If you believe this kind of thing, his bubble is now the infinite majesty of the universe.
He’s no longer confined, but immortal, and forever loved by those whose feelings he’d
touched.
This writer doesn’t mind admitting it, he’s feeling a bit choked up right now.
Disease can be a fascinating, if terrible subject, so check out, “What Is Locked-in
Syndrome?
Worst Thing That Can Happen To You!”
If that’s too much for you right now, try this instead….