Around 4:30, she walked the short distance from her offie to David's quarters, confident that she could remedy the situation in no time flat.
David seemed glad to see Murphy, whom he remembered as "the lady with the leaf." Even so, he rebuffed her attempts to get him into the playroom. After a couple of hours, she gave up for the day.
As she left, David looked in her eyes. "Lady," he said, "you will be back."
He was right. By the following day, Murphy had decided that trying to talk David into the playroom was useless. Instead, she borrowed a bowl of goldfish from the desk of a third-floor secretary, and placed the bowl on the far side of the playroom. David was excited by the fish, and tried to convince Murphy to bring them next to his crib. She refused.
The strategy worked. Anxious to examine the fish more closely, David crawled through the tube, down the three-stepped ladder and into the playroom. UPI got its photographs, the medical team got its good publicity and Murphy was invited to help in David's day-to-day care.
Privately, nurses complained to her that the playroom incident was minor compared to other problems they were beginning to have with the child. "They wanted him to behave and be compliant," said Murphy. Eventually, she became known as "the fire extinguisher": the person to call when David was in emotional crisis.
Three and a half years after David's birth, Texas Children's Hospital finally discussed the ethics of keeping a child isolated indefinitely. Now many hospitals have ethics committees that routinely consider complicated decisions. But in the '70s, such groups were rare.
On February 26, 1975, about 30 doctors, theologians and other concerned parties -- including Mary Murphy -- gathered in the hospital's conference room. All the chairs were filled, and people stood in the back of the room. Dr. Wilson, the project's scientific director, gave a synopsis of David's history, then opened the session for questions.
The most pointed of those questions came from Dr. Robert Main, another chaplain. "You're in the honeymoon stage of treating him now," said Main, who had examined David. "One day he will take a look at himself and decide he doesn't want to be in there till he gets to be 15 years of age."
Nonetheless, Dr. Montgomery, another of David's original doctors, brought the meeting to an upbeat close. Under similar circumstances, he said, he would start this project again with another child.
"How many more?" someone asked.
"Until I determined that there was no more information to be gained by such a thing," Montgomery replied, "or if the outcome was certain."
The Reverend Raymond J. Lawrence, the chaplain of Texas Children's, had convened the meeting, but he was disappointed by its results. The real ethical issues, he says, were never discussed.
"The great scandal of the Bubble Boy was that he was conceived for the bubble," says Lawrence, now director of the department of pastoral care at the Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. "The team that did this didn't think through this very well. They didn't consider what would happen if they didn't find an immediate cure. They operated on the assumption that you could live to be 80 years old in a bubble, and that would be unfortunate but okay."
In the years since, Lawrence's outrage has not abated. He continues to maintain that the three original doctors convinced David's parents to conceive him because they wanted a test subject for their studies of immunology. The doctors flatly deny the charge.
No other ethical conferences on the subject were ever convened. And when contacted recently, Dr. Montgomery stood firmly by the decision to place David in the bubble. "At the time, we were encouraged by everything we knew," he says. "If people didn't take chances, none of us would be here. Columbus would have stayed in Spain and would have been selling tortillas, because he was warned he would sail off the edge of the earth."
Mary Murphy didn't have a lot of free time to spend with David. During the day, her job required her to evaluate other kids at the hospital's developmental center; at night, she needed to work on her doctoral thesis.
She says David offered a bargain: If she would work on her dissertation in his room at the hospital every other evening, including Saturdays, he would promise not to talk.
As Murphy worked on her dissertation, David spent his time watching television and, later, doing his homework. (He had tutors, and attended an elementary school class in Conroe by telephone hookup.) He showed a flair for math, but rarely read for pleasure, a fact that disappointed Murphy. She'd hoped that books would provide him an escape from the bubble.
Instead, over the years, his sense of hopelessness increased. "Even though David was only five," wrote Murphy, "he recognized his difference and dreaded what the future held -- limited choices, feelings of alienation and an increased need to be polite and compliant so as not to reveal his anger."
Most of the time, David lived deep within himself. "He was always used to being very polite," she remembered. It took her a long time to tell when he was saying what he meant, and when he was saying what she wanted him to say. "That is, I guess, one of the things that kept me uncomfortable," she admitted. "I sensed he was being excruciatingly polite sometimes when he didn't really want to be. Most kids that age don't have that kind of façade. They don't bother."
