In Game of Life, Boy Beats Odds

--Tommy John Weller, a 3 1/2-year-old who had spent his entire life in a hospital fighting the heart and lung problems of premature birth, went home for good in Danton, Pa. Tommy, who is deaf, played quietly, with only a small tracheotomy tube in his throat to make his breathing easier; and the oxygen tank his parents must carry with him hinted at how sick the blond, brown-eyed little boy had been. “Even though Tommy came through some pretty bad times, I knew he’d make it,” said his mother, Anne Weller, 29. “I guess it’s just a mother’s instinct.” Born Dec. 19, 1981, 10 weeks premature, Tommy weighed 2 pounds, 14 ounces and had hyaline membrane disease, a respiratory failure caused by underdeveloped lungs. Doctors gave him less than a 10% chance of survival and put him on a respirator in intensive care, where he battled pulmonary failures and cardiac arrests for more than three years. In June, he was weaned from the respirator and allowed for the first time to mingle with other children in the pediatrics unit and go outdoors. He since has grown 2 inches and now weighs 22 pounds and is 33 inches tall. “He’s almost like a sponge right now. He’s just sucking up everything he can see, and his development has been phenomenal since we got him out of the intensive care unit,” said Tommy’s primary physician, Dr. Stephen Wolf. By the time Tommy starts kindergarten, he should be a normal pupil in a school for the hearing impaired. “The important thing is we made it,” Anne Weller said. “And now we’re a family,” Tom Weller added.

--Columbus, Ohio, Zoo Director Jack Hanna said his wife, Suzi, was playing with a white tiger cub at the zoo and later discovered that the diamond from her engagement ring, appraised at $9,000 in 1981, was missing. She used hand clippers to cut the grass in the tiger enclosure, raking the clippings and bagging them so she and her husband could sift them later. However, a groundskeeper picked up the clippings and fed them to the elephants and the tiger. So the Hannas are following the tiger and the elephants around--and worrying about the birds, who might see the glittering stone. “This could go through the entire chain of evolution,” Hanna complained.

--Samantha Smith’s mother said in Manchester, Me., that she plans to watch the new television series “Lime Street,” in which her late daughter co-starred. Samantha, who was cast in the ABC-TV series as a daughter of an insurance investigator played by Robert Wagner, died Aug. 25 when a Bar Harbor Airlines plane crashed in Auburn. Me. Her father, Arthur Smith, and six others also were killed.