$10-Million Little Boy : Medicine: Seriously ill children like Richard Hall will be able to get help from top specialists when a new diagnostic center opens March 26.

Richard Hall, the $10-million boy, doesn’t pay much attention as the doctors seated in the auditorium at Ventura County Medical Center listen in awe to the story of his difficult, terribly expensive struggle against life-threatening birth defects.

Richard, after all, is only 6 and, as his father, Navy Lt. Bert A. Hall, puts it, “He’s pretty much recovered by now. Mainly, we just have to watch him.”

Richard’s story is one of a family’s determination to save a child’s life. It also helps illustrate the need for a center in Ventura County where seriously ill children can be diagnosed by top specialists from throughout Southern California.

Such a facility will open March 26--the County Medical Center’s Pediatric Diagnostic Center, at 3400 Loma Vista Road in Ventura, across the street from the medical center’s main building.

At least 18 pediatric specialists from the UCLA and USC medical schools, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and other highly regarded universities and hospitals will visit the new center regularly to advise patients and their physicians. The visitors’ expertise will include cardiology, allergies, plastic surgery, neurosurgery and child psychology.

On Jan. 24, 1984, when Richard was born 10 weeks early at VCMC, no such program existed here. Richard, who could neither breathe nor take nourishment unassisted, had to travel thousands of miles, mainly to Los Angeles and San Diego, often for examinations that could have been conducted locally had the new center existed.

“Mainly, Richard had two things wrong with him,” said his mother, Maria, 33, as the family was interviewed after a meeting with members of the hospital staff.

“First, he had a laryngeal cleft, or a hole in the voice box area. Second, the wall was missing that was supposed to separate his trachea and his esophagus. The trachea carries air to the lungs; the esophagus carries food to the stomach.

“Before we were through, he had to have 18 operations, mostly at Children’s Hospital in San Diego. At first, the surgery was to keep him alive by inserting tubes in him. Later, there was a series of operations to repair the missing wall and cleft.

“In the first two years, our medical bills totaled about $5 million. That’s when we quit counting. Today, they must come to at least $10 million.” Most of this, she said, was paid by the family’s military health insurance. A state agency, California Children’s Services, took care of the rest, sometimes by persuading doctors and hospitals to reduce their fees.

Richard’s father, Bert Hall, 39, an aircraft maintenance officer at Point Mugu Naval Air Station, where the family lives, said that, because of Richard’s weakened lungs, he caught pneumonia about 50 times.

“And about as often as that he quit breathing, and my wife and I had to bring him back with cardiopulmonary resuscitation,” Hall said.

For three years, Hall said, neither he nor his wife got much sleep. “We stayed up all night listening for mucus to collect in Richard’s throat. Sometimes it happened six times an hour. We’d rush in and clear it out with a little suction machine. If we didn’t, he’d choke.”

Even Richard’s brother, William, now 10, learned to use the suction device so he could lend a hand.

Now, Richard’s primary treatment is medication prescribed by Dr. Christopher Landon, director of the new diagnostic center and head of pediatrics at VCMC. Richard has recovered to the point where he’s in kindergarten at Laguna Vista Elementary School in Oxnard, where his brother, William, is a fourth-grader.

Landon was so eager to open the new diagnostic center--it’s in a 3,000-square-foot building that formerly housed a physical therapy facility--that he took out a personal loan to finance the center.

“Eventually, the county will pay me back out of hospital bed fees,” he said. “I’m not concerned about that.”

Landon estimated that more than 10,000 children a year will be treated and diagnosed in the new center. A clinic that formerly served half as many patients is being phased out, he said.

Landon and the Halls credited a Navy pediatrician, Cmdr. Michael Hurwitz, with guiding the family through much of the maze of hospitals and specialists with which they dealt. For his part, Hurwitz, who is stationed at the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Port Hueneme, praised the Halls for being “marvelous--and that includes William.”

“I’m sure,” Hurwitz added, “the Halls would have been saved a great deal of travel, distress and risk if we’d had this new diagnostic center at the time. In a case like Richard’s, you can do some consulting by phone, but the specialists really need to see the child in person.”