Correcting Nature's Error

When Phillip was born in the West Texas town of Kermit (pop. 7,000), doctors soon saw that nature had made a series of deadly mistakes. Milk could not reach the baby's stomach, because his gullet came to a dead end in the upper chest. He had no anal opening (the lower colon wound itself into another dead end). Furthermore, both kidneys were on the right side, and one did not work. Surgeons at nearby Odessa made a temporary opening into Phillip's stomach so he could be fed, and another opening in the lower bowel for evacuation. But the sickly infant, in constant danger of death from pneumonia or choking in his own saliva, was still an insupportable burden to his father (a low-paid oilfield worker) and his mother who had four other youngsters to care for.

During one of Phillip's hospital sieges in Galveston, Mrs. Steven Culpepper. an Abilene housewife with one son of her own, heard of his plight and undertook to care for him. Her aim: major surgery, for permanent correction of Phillip's physical defects. For almost two years, no hospital would risk it because of court fights over Phillip's custody. But armed at last with full adoption papers affirmed by the state Supreme Court, Mrs. Culpepper took her adopted boy to Texas Children's Hospital in Houston. There, during the summer, surgeons removed the nonfunctioning "left" kidney from Phillip Culpepper's right side.

And there, late last month, surgeons finished the job of correcting nature's errors. They freed Phillip's windpipe from a useless connection with his stomach, made a continuous passage from mouth, through throat and gullet, to stomach. After intravenous feeding during convalescence (and almost three years of being fed liquids through a tube), Phillip Culpepper demanded an egg. Last week he got it--fried, "over easy." Far from wealthy (her husband is a journeyman plumber), Mrs. Culpepper had gambled $1,000 in legal expenses and $2,000 in medical bills to give the boy a chance for normal life. "My husband and I decided we'd rather have him than anything else." she explained, "so we just sacrificed." The sight of a healthy-looking Phillip (he will be three on Dec. 28), eating an egg and almost ready to go home, was their payoff.

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