Caption: David Phillip Witt
"He never touched the world, but the world was touched by him!"
It's the epitaph on the tombstone of David Phillip Vetter, who lived in a plastic bubble from a few seconds after birth to two weeks before his death at age 12, so he was often called "Bubble Boy."
In fact, even the last two weeks of his life when he came out of the "bubble", he spent it in a sterile environment in the hospital, because contact with the world would kill him in a short time.
But it is such a person, such a short life, that boosts modern medicine and saves many newborns every year.
David's rare disease
David suffers from severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), a condition that causes patients to have no normal immune system, and any bacteria that come into contact with him can lead to his death, so he can only live in sterile bubbles.
SCID is a congenital genetic disorder, and the most common condition is caused by a fatal defect on the X chromosome, so it only affects boys because girls can get a normal X chromosome from their father.
In fact, before David, his parents had already had a son who died of this disease, and he only stayed in this world for seven months.
So David's parents knew very well that David could also suffer from the same disease, because their children would have a 50% chance of getting sick as long as they were boys.
But as Catholics, they didn't give up on David, believing that bone marrow transplantation technology at the time could already rebuild the immune system for immune-deficient children, and they had an ideal bone marrow donor— David's sister Catherine.
So, in September 1971, David was born at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston. Unfortunately, he and his brother were the 50 percent victims, and a few seconds after coming into the world, David was put into a sterile plastic bubble.
Unfortunately, his and his sister Catherine's blood types don't match exactly, so he can only grow up in bubbles and wait for doctors to find a cure. This wait is 12 years, and it is not a cure.
Of course, there were many children like David at the time, but none of them endured as long as David.
Life in a bubble
Doctors, nurses and family members could only reach him through plastic gloves hanging from the walls of his room.
Anything David gets is sterilized and then inserted into the bubble through the airlock, including food, water, diapers, clothes, books, and a small TV.
His family in front of us was Catholic, so David was still baptized in bubbles, but with sterilized holy water.
When David was 3 years old, his parents installed a hospital-like bubble in his home in Conroe, Texas, which allowed him to finally go home.
When he was 6 years old, NASA made him a special spacesuit that allowed him to walk around without the bubbles and play with water with his sister for the first time.
However, he only wore it 7 times and never wore it again, because wearing this dress is a tedious task and needs to be connected to the bubble by a long tube.
David is an American miracle, so his every move appears on TV from time to time, a bit like the star of the real-life version of Truman's World.
Although he was always elated at the camera, according to a doctor who assisted him mentally, David would lose his temper with the injustice of fate outside the camera.
Technological breakthrough - bone marrow transplantation - failure
In October 1983, David's attending physician tried a new bone marrow technique that didn't require a perfect match of blood, so his sister could donate bone marrow to him this time.
At first, the process appeared to have been successful, but a virus lurked in Catherine's bone marrow— epstein-Barr virus.
It was a carcinogenic virus (of course, people didn't know that the virus could cause cancer at this time, this was the first time), it was fine in Catherine's body, but it triggered a cancer tumor in David, which overwhelmed David's body.
Finally, he was taken out of the bubble and treated in a sterile ward. For the first time in his life, he was able to accept the most primitive human contact: the kiss of his mother, but the story came to an end.
On February 22, 1984, two weeks after leaving Bubble, David blinked at his doctor, William T. Shearer, and as a last word, he died.
At last
Although severe combined immunodeficiency is rare, one in every 50,000 to 100,000 newborns is hit (note: this probability span is so large because there are several different studies, each with a different probability indicated), and about 140 million people are born each year, which means that 1400 to 2800 people will have the disease.
However, through the observation and treatment of David, a new understanding of the disease was gained, and David became the last person to be enclosed in the bubble, and he saved the newcomers.
Since David's death, medical science has progressed to the point where the disease is usually successfully treated if a bone marrow transplant is performed within the first three months of a baby.
In addition, the disease can also be detected through pregnancy tests, and then repaired in the mother's womb, but this technology is not yet mature.
This is David's indirect contribution to medicine, which, although he only had a short 12-year life, was left with a valuable asset for medicine.