Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 11, 1991 TAG: 9103110054
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: FLOYD LENGTH: Long
He plays with his trucks, loves peanut butter and Nintendo games, goes to preschool with the other kids and demands constant attention.
His giggle is deep and from the belly, the kind of innocent laugh a 4-year-old should have.
It's only when you take a closer look that you notice something odd. Brandon has too many fingers and toes.
No big deal, right?
It is, when you realize that the spare parts almost ended Brandon's life.
Before his birth, doctors believed the unborn Brandon was the victim of Meckel-Gruber Syndrome, a rare and almost always fatal genetic disease.
Ultrasound tests revealed not only the extra digits, but also that his kidneys were enlarged. Both are symptoms of the disease.
Brandon's mother, Donna Caldwell, said she was told by her physician, Dr. Mark Eggleston, that her son would likely live only a few hours or days or, with luck, a few weeks. There was also a chance he would be born dead or without a brain.
She decided to have an abortion.
"I didn't want to go full term only to have him born dead or only have a few hours with him," Caldwell said. "Once I formed an attachment, it would have made it only that much harder."
She checked into Roanoke Memorial Hospital and was given Pitocin, a drug to induce early labor. She was seven months pregnant.
Three hours into the procedure, Eggleston began to have doubts about the abortion after a fellow doctor questioned how certain he was that the child had the disease.
He stopped the Pitocin.
"Somebody was watching over us that day," Caldwell said recently as she roughhoused with her son on the floor of their mobile home.
Eggleston himself opposes abortion, but will agree to perform them when the fetus is likely to be stillborn or severely deformed, according to his attorney, William Eskridge of Abingdon.
"He was basically talked out of the abortion by a colleague playing the devil's advocate," Eskridge said.
Brandon was born four weeks premature a month after the attempted abortion. He weighed 4 pounds, 12 ounces. Eggleston, who no longer practices in Roanoke, did not do the delivery.
Caldwell, now 22, said she was scared when she went into labor for real. "I was wondering if Brandon was going to be OK or not, whether he would live or not."
She also was glad the waiting was over.
Like many premature babies, Brandon was born with a collapsed lung and was placed in an incubator. Caldwell didn't get to hold him for three weeks.
Not until she brought Brandon home from the hospital did she have feelings of happiness.
"I got to bring him home, sit down with him and enjoy him by myself for the first time with no doctors and no family around," she said. "I just enjoyed being with him."
It almost made her cry.
"But that would've been a waste of tears. I had already shed enough tears before he was born."
Meanwhile, she filed a wrongful-life lawsuit against Eggleston for allowing her son to be born deformed. She asked for $1 million.
"He should never have performed the abortion, and once he got into it, he never should've stopped," she said. "But I'm grateful he did."
Her attorney, Jimmy Turk of Radford, explained: "After his birth, she was told that Brandon probably had this Meckel-Gruber Syndrome and wouldn't live past a year."
So, "she had to begin all over again to prepare for the loss of her child."
Turk said it caused Caldwell emotional distress. She was angry that Brandon had been saved only to live a life of pain and suffering.
"As time has gone on and the child has proved to be an exception, she has lost most of her ill feelings toward Dr. Eggleston," Turk said.
Caldwell recalled the first time Brandon smiled. "I realized then that maybe he will live no matter what he's got."
Brandon's pediatrician, Dr. F. Joseph Duckwall at Lewis-Gale Clinic, said it is unclear now whether Brandon suffers from Meckel-Gruber Syndrome.
"That's the best diagnosis they've come up with so far, but to me it's just a label," he said. "He doesn't fit all the criteria."
In addition to the extra digits and enlarged kidneys, Brandon is nearsighted, abnormally large for his age and has been slow to develop speech and other motor functions. None of his problems can be linked to the attempted abortion.
"He's a different child, obviously. You can tell that just by looking at him," Duckwall said. "But he has done amazingly well on the primary issue of living and dying.
"The bottom line is that he's still progressing. His development has continued to progress, even though it's been at a slower pace, and that's a good sign."
Brandon took his first steps at 14 months, his first word was "Momma," and he attends preschool at Floyd Elementary. His mother hopes eventually to have him mainstreamed into regular classes.
"I can't believe I almost didn't get to see him at all," she said.
The ordeal has taught her one lesson: "I've learned not to trust doctors anymore. Instead, I've got this little voice inside me that I listen to now."
The lawsuit was settled last month, with Brandon receiving $7,500 and his mother a substantially larger, undisclosed amount.
Caldwell, who has remarried since Brandon was born, said she and her husband plan to use some of the lawsuit money to build a house. It will also be used to help Brandon.
In the end, the wrongful-life issue of the lawsuit was not the deciding factor in its settlement.
"The reason we settled the suit was not because he didn't perform the abortion," Eskridge, the doctor's attorney, said. "His mistake was in not deciding sooner not to recommend it."
Under the circumstances, he believed Caldwell's claim of emotional distress was valid. "She had been all psyched up for the abortion. More than that, she had been admitted to the hospital and the procedure had been started," he said.
Turk agrees. "The problem she has, and will always have, is that she feels like her doctor didn't inform her properly. He never gave her all the facts."
Caldwell said there will always be something missing for her, something that can never be claimed in a lawsuit.
"Looking back, I feel that they took away from me the joy of being pregnant for the first time. I couldn't look forward to him being born like I should have been able to," she said.
Her second child, David, was born eight months ago. Caldwell said it was a much more pleasant experience.
But had she found out David also suffered from Meckel-Gruber Syndrome or some other genetic defect, she would have gone through with the pregnancy. She said an abortion would not have been an option.
"I'm not for it. I'm not against it. But with my second baby I wanted to wait for the outcome no matter what."
Caldwell, meantime, is optimistic about Brandon. "To us, there's nothing wrong with Brandon," she said. "Although whether he's going to be like other 20-year-olds they can't tell us for sure."
But she'll settle for less - happily.
"I'm just so proud of Brandon. I'm just proud that he's alive and he can do what he does."
by CNB