The Controversy Leads To A Risk
When he was 8 years old, doctors told him that it may take another 10 years to come up with the cure, meaning that he would have to live in the bubble until adulthood. This idea of a grown man in a bubble was part of the inspiration for the movies. But the more people learned about David Vetter’s true life, the more people started to voice their opinions on the issue. There was even a huge discussion about his situation by the University of Virginia as doctors and professors speculated over the ethics of raising a child in a bubble.
Since it had been years since the doctors even attempted to take David out of his bubble, many people wrote to his mother, Carol Ann, saying that she was cruel for keeping him a “prisoner” inside of the plastic. Many people accused her of being overprotective, controlling, and a bad mom. She got a lot of criticism from both the professional world and just the random person who decided to send a hateful letter.
At age 11, David was thinking a lot more about the outside world and asked to see the stars. His parents had to make a lot of arrangements for him to do this, and he was able to stare at the night sky for just 20 minutes on his birthday. When he was 12, he was beginning to enter his teenage years, and he wasn’t afraid to voice his desire to get out of the bubble and be a part of the rest of the world.
David’s desire to leave the bubble, combined with the public pressure was enough for his parents to take a risk. The cure was not complete, but there were experimental procedures that doctors hoped would work. A man named Dr. William Shearer suggested that they could take bone marrow from David’s sister, Katherine, who was born healthy and inject him with it. This had worked in other cases of SCID, so they hoped that this would be enough to cure him, but there was no guarantee that it would work.
We now know today that even if two people are siblings, that does not necessarily make them a perfect bone marrow donor. In the successful cases that worked for other SCID patients, they may have just gotten lucky. Unfortunately for David, he and his sister were not a perfect match, and it did not work. His parents had hoped that if the procedure failed, it would just mean that he could continue living on in the bubble.
During the short window of time that he was out of the bubble receiving the surgery, he caught the Epstein-Barr virus. Just two weeks after the surgery, he contracted a cancer called lymphoma, and it spread through his body so quickly. Without any immune system at all, the cancer destroyed his body. Even though the public gave David’s parents a hard time, they were right all along. He should have never left his bubble.