After initial anguish, family of cerebral palsy poster child is picture of happiness

Tom and Susan Murphy had been trying for two years to have children before Susan finally became pregnant with their son. And the pregnancy was perfect--until the child was born 6 1/2 weeks premature.

The pediatrician assured the Redondo Beach couple that little Brian would be fine. But within months, they began to be concerned. The child wasn’t rolling over, wasn’t crawling properly. A year passed, and Brian still could not sit up.

Finally, Susan Murphy took her tiny son to the Harbor Regional Center, which referred her to a specialist, who told her that Brian’s brain had been damaged at birth. A disease known as hyaline membrane disease had collapsed his lungs when he was an infant, depriving his brain of oxygen just long enough to induce cerebral palsy.

“It was a shock,” she recalled. “It was just so painful. We walked around in a daze.”

It took four grueling, anguished and, eventually, rewarding years for the couple to accept their son’s condition.

This weekend, Brian, now 5 and walking, will star on the United Cerebral Palsy national telethon.

“It was very difficult to come to terms with, and we dealt with it in very different ways,” said Tom Murphy, 39, a corporate vice president with Ezra Mintz Associates Inc., an Inglewood communications company. “My way was denial. No matter what anybody told me, I kept believing that this boy would be just like the rest of us.”

Meanwhile, Susan Murphy, 33, became obsessed with Brian’s condition, burying herself in medical texts. But with counseling--and the tonic of time--the couple gradually began to enjoy their son, who they now say is “a miraculous gift.”

“This may sound corny, but I believe my son was given to me, just as he is, as a special gift from God,” Susan Murphy said Friday. “There are so many things we just take for granted. With a child like Brian, you get your priorities straight real quick.”

Take walking, for example. It wasn’t until he was 4 1/2 that Brian took his first steps without the aid of a walker and hip braces. Barely recovered from surgery on his legs, the little boy began spending three hours a day methodically teaching himself to stand, balance and walk alone.

“If you could have seen him,” his mother said. “He worked for hours on end every day, and all on his own. One step, two steps, and he’d fall. And then he’d get up and do it again. One step, two steps, and he’d fall again. Until after a couple of months, he could walk all the way down the hallway to us. It was a miracle.”

Now, she said, he is trying to teach himself to run; his favorite pastimes are watching sports on TV and playing catch with his father. Next year, he will be mainstreamed into a first-grade class at a nearby elementary school.

The poster-child idea came out of a promise Susan Murphy made to Brian’s godmother while visiting her in Chicago.

“She said, ‘Susan, he’s just so adorable. He’d make a wonderful poster child,’ ” she recalled. “I promised her we’d look into it.” And when she got home to the South Bay, Susan wrote to the San Fernando Valley office of United Cerebral Palsy and suggested Brian as a theme child for this year’s Star-athon ’90.

United Cerebral Palsy officials said the organization has about 700,000 theme children, one for each general area--often even each county--in its coast-to-coast fund-raising drive. However, because Los Angeles is such a large media market, Brian has received additional exposure, appearing in national advertisements as well as in the Las Vegas portion of the telethon, where he will be on stage with host Bobby Vinton to accept a donation from the Imperial Palace hotel.

The telethon, which began Saturday, will continue through today and will air on about 80 stations around the country.