Cody's boo-boo

MORLEY, Mo. -- The doorbell rings at 431 Kelly St., a simple single-story home that is larger on the inside than its boxy exterior indicates. The chime triggers a rapid patter of footfalls from within. Seconds later the inside door swings open to reveal a tiny doorman with brown eyes set in a chubby round face.

Cody Phillips mumbles an indecipherable welcome, then hurries his guest back to the Hewlett Packard in the back corner of the front room. Here the 3-year-old has been playing his Thomas the train computer game. Pulling levers and pushing buttons on the game's special control box, Cody has been directing the on-screen Thomas, hauling track and helping his locomotive friends. With Cody's little brother, Nathaniel, crying and the big-screen television blaring in the background, the Phillips house seems like that of a normal young family, alive with activity.

But the television is a rental, brought home through Daniel Phillips', Cody's father, work at Rent-A-Center. It will be returned soon. On the table behind Cody is a centerpiece of a half-dozen brown pharmacy bottles beneath a wall clock frozen at 11:20 -- as if the caretaker has been too busy to notice, much less reset it. They subtly point to Cody's secret.

He is fighting a rare condition known as aplastic anemia. In fact, since he was diagnosed in October, Cody's family has been fighting to stay afloat in a mounting sea of medical bills and related costs like a biweekly trip to a clinic in St. Louis.

Their situation has become so dire that the Southeast Missourian Jr. is organizing an auction to help raise the $2,000 the family needs to pay the California mortgage company before Wednesday. If they can't, they may lose their home.

Aplastic anemia is a disorder that results from the unexplained failure of bone marrow to produce blood cells. It can be life threatening. In the shadow of this monster, Cody seems impervious. He is smiling, pleasant. Except for a Buddha belly and a pair of puffy cheeks that seem unnatural on his small frame, he looks and acts like any boy his age. But don't think he doesn't know what's going on.

"Cody, show him your boo-boo," directs Cody's father, who at 7:30 p.m. just got home from his 10-hour day at the Rent-A-Center in Jackson.

Cody immediately stands up on his chair and lifts his shirt to reveal two white tubes budding from his chest.

"We've got to change it tonight," says Cody, patting his chest where the Broviac catheter enters one of his arteries.

He knows it's time to change the bandage. When the nurses come to the house on Mondays and Thursdays, Cody knows they've come to draw blood from these tubes. He may not fully understand the disease that has caused his body to turn against his liver, but he knows what it's like to be stuck with needles at least once if not three times a day while spending a month in the hospital. He knows the feeling of undergoing a full blood transfusion, a liver biopsy, a bone marrow biopsy and weekly platelet transfusions. He knows the bitter taste of unpronounceable medications that strain his little body, including the steroids that strengthen his liver but have hung the extra 15 pounds on his bones. Cody has been forced to mature beyond his years. So have his parents.

The white binder

Cody's mother, Angela Phillips, is 22 years old. Eight-months pregnant with her third child, she was forced to take an unpaid leave of absence from her job at Wal-Mart in Sikeston to stay at home and care for Cody. In the six months since her son's diagnosis, she has watched Cody undergo countless medical treatments, watched her family sink deeper into debt and lost her mother to a severe stroke. But at 7:30 p.m., after a day of chasing and chastising, she can sit and recount her recent tragedy without a tear or even a break in her voice. She is numb, callused, in shock from what she's been through and afraid to think about what may be yet to come.

To help her narrate, she pulls out a white binder, thick with tabs and pages about aplastic anemia. In this book is a detailed chronology of every test her baby's been through, every drug they've put into his body.

It started last Oct. 13.

"We were coming home from dinner at my mom and dad's," Angela Phillips recounts. "Cody was playing around in the car, and I noticed his eyes were yellow."

Fearing it was some form of hepatitis, she took him to his pediatrician in Cape Girardeau. It was discovered his platelet count was low. The doctor told Cody's parents to wait 48 hours so further tests could be run. After a second opinion corroborated the suspicion of hepatitis, she was told not to worry.

"They said there was nothing we could do," Angela Phillips says, looking up from the binder. "They said to just let it run its course."

However, when the family returned home from a similar dinner with Angela Phillip's parents, they had an urgent message waiting on the machine. It said to bring Cody to Southeast Missouri Hospital immediately. They did so, watched doctors take more blood from Cody and waited. After an hour, the doctors told the Phillips to take Cody to St. Louis Children's Hospital immediately. It was 11 p.m. on Oct. 17.

They arrived at the hospital at 3 a.m. Awaiting them at the door were three doctors and a handful of nurses who took Cody and drew more blood for testing. He would not leave that hospital for a month.

"He didn't look sick," Angela Phillips remembers. "We were there at 3 a.m. and he was bouncing off the walls. But the doctors told me he was sick."

Cody's platelet count was dropping dramatically. Still unsure what was wrong, the doctors went down a list of diseases to find one that fit what they were seeing in Cody. Ultimately the doctors agreed that the yellow eyes and the liver problems were in part due to autoimmune hepatitis. But in order to explain the dropping blood cell counts, they arrived at a diagnosis of aplastic anemia.

More bad news

When it became apparent that Cody was going to be in St. Louis for a while, Angela Phillips took her leave of absence from work. Daniel Phillips worked his jobat Aramark Uniforms and monitored the bills as they came in. Medicaid was helping with the hospital bills, but because both parents were employed and because they were carrying a mortgage, they were not eligible for additional welfare.

The family vehicles weren't reliable enough to be counted on for daily trips to St. Louis, so the couple was forced to find rides with family members. Eventually, Auffenberg Motors learned of their plight and offered to rent them a car for $1 a day.

They were grateful for the help, but given the situation the parents wanted a reliable vehicle that belonged to them. Coad Chevrolet gave them a break on the payments, but the new pickup truck added to the debt piling up.

At home, Daniel Phillips saw the problems mounting and was trying to find a way to tell his wife. They had fallen four months behind on their mortgage payment.

Meanwhile, Angela Phillips at Cody's side in St. Louis received a phone call from her sister saying that their mother had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Originally they thought she was suffering from a severe migraine, but upon her arrival doctors confirmed that it was an aneurysm. Several subsequent strokes later, her mother died. Daniel Phillip's father rushed to St. Louis to relieve his daughter-in-law's watch, enabling her to come home and see her mother one last time. She decided not to tell Cody.

A hopeful homecoming

Now settled into his home routine, Cody is still carefree. He knows his nurses and accepts their business with him as a matter of course. His cell count, while still low, has leveled out. It has been 11 weeks since his last platelet transfusion. The secret has been finding a balance in his medication and keeping high spirits around him. The latter is becoming harder to maintain.

Cody may still need a bone marrow transplant to cure his sickness. All of his immediate relatives have come up negative as donor matches. Sibling matches have a higher percentage of success than other donors, making the sample that will be taken from the umbilical cord of the new baby that much more important.

"It's kind of our wild card," Angela Phillips says with both hands on her stomach.

Though it's impossible to push Cody's illness to any back burner, the impending foreclosure on their house has had to take some priority.

When Angela Phillips brought Cody home from St. Louis, her husband gave her their bad financial news. They sat down to try and fix the problem. Daniel Phillips took a new, higher-paying job in Jackson, where he works about 48 hours a week and grabs every minute of overtime that they'll give him.

They have tried to negotiate with the mortgage company, but the family must make a payment of $2,000 by Wednesday or the foreclosure sale will be held March 19.

"We've tried everything we could try," Angela Phillips says looking over at Cody, still immersed in his video game. "We wanted to take care of it ourselves. But we've had so much help already."

The Southeast Missouri Jr. will auction off front-row seats to the upcoming Brooks and Dunn concert at the Show Me Center in hopes enough money will be raised.

"It's worth a shot," Angela Phillips says. "We've tried everything else."

When asked what they will do if they do lose the house, Angela Phillips replies with a drawn out sigh. "We really don't know."

Right now, the future is a vast unknown for the Phillips family. But Angela takes comfort in the knowledge that now someone close is watching over Cody.

"When my mom died, I knew that whoever was Cody's guardian angel got kicked out of his spot," she says.

Although she had trouble finding a way to tell Cody about his grandma's passing, pretty soon Cody started asking why his grandma wasn't in church.

Angela turns to Cody, still at the computer and asks, "Cody, where's momma Becky?"

Cody immediately turns away from the screen and replies, "In heaven."

trehagen@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137

Want to donate?

What: Online auction of two front-row seats to the Brooks and Dunn Concert at the Show Me Center on Thursday, April 1, at 7:30 p.m. The auction will benefit the family of Cody Phillips, who recently was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a rare bone marrow disfunction.

Where: semissourian.com/auction

When: March 13 through 24

Information: Call Cheryl Ellis at (573) 335-6611, ext. 111

Also: Donations for the family may be sent to the Missourian at 301 Broadway, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702. Checks should be made out to the United Way, but the memo line should specify "Phillips family fund."