Doctor Rises from Ghetto

Excerpted from
It's a Miracle 3: Extraordinary Real-Life Stories Based on the PAX TV Series It's a Miracle
By Richard Thomas

In 1963, Ben Carson was a poor kid growing up in a tough inner-city neighborhood in Detroit. Michigan. Violent and out of control, the twelve-year-old boy was headed for a life of crime. And when he wasn't running from the law, Ben was skipping school, getting Ds and Fs. His future looked hopeless.

"I had no competition for the bottom of the class," remembers Ben. "Just the worst student you could possibly imagine. I was what I called the 'safety net; No one had to worry about getting the lowest grade as long as I was there. You know, it didn't really bother me all that much, but it bothered the heck out of my mother."

Sonya C-arson was raising her two sons on her own and she was deeply concerned about Ben's bad attitude and academic failure. She decided to do something about it. There would be daily Bible study and no TV. She told him, "You know what else you're going to do? You're going to read two books a week. No ifs, ands, or buts. I'm saying it's going to happen, and this is what you are going to do."

And to prove that he'd read the books, Ben was required to give her a written report on each one. As Ben's reading improved, so did his grades, but the anger and rage inside him continued to grow. And he always fought back-even when the odds of winning were against him. Even at home, Ben was not able to control his anger.

Ben recalls, "My mother wanted me to wear a piece of clothing that I didn't want to wear. I told her, 'People are going to make fun of me.' She was trying to thrust it upon me, and I was just getting madder and madder. I had a pathological temper, and there was a hammer. I grabbed the hammer, and I went to hit her in the head with it."

Ben's brother stopped him before he was able to strike their mother.

"I just totally lost control when I got angry," says Ben. "I didn't think in a way that was rational at all, and that was such a problem for me."

As he got older, Ben became more aggressive. Even his friends weren't safe from his increasingly violent behavior.

"When I was fourteen, I was having a dispute with a friend over a radio station," says Ben. "He wouldn't change it back to the station I had it on, and I happened to have a large camping knife on my person, and I actually lunged at him. Fortunately, he had a large metal belt buckle on and the knife blade struck it. He was totally shocked. Hut I was even more shocked, because I stopped at that moment, and I said to myself, 'What did you just do? You tried to kill somebody.'

"I went home and I locked myself in the bathroom and I just couldn't believe that I had tried to kill somebody. You know, by that time I had turned my grades around. I was an A-student. I thought I was on my way to becoming a doctor, and I just recognized that I wasn't going to be a doctor; I wasn't going to be anything except somebody in a reform school or someone who was dead because of that temper. And yet I felt powerless to change it."

Following the wisdom of his mother, Ben turned to the family Bible.

Ben remembers, 441 picked up my Bible and started reading from the Book of Proverbs, which has multiple verses about anger and how foolishly people behave who cannot control their temper. And for three hours I read and contemplated and prayed, and I came to an understanding that people who reacted angrily were people who were extraordinarily weak. People who had absolutely no control of themselves. And I decided that that wasn't who I was. That I was smarter than that, and that would never happen to me again. And that was the end of the temper. Never had another problem with it since that day."

From that day on Ben focused on his studies and his dreams of becoming a doctor. He graduated at the top of his high school class and was accepted into Yale University on a scholarship. Four years later he went on to study at the University of Michigan's prestigious school of medicine. There, he became fascinated with the human brain and decided to become a neurosurgeon.

In 1984, Dr. Ben Carson, at the age of thirty-three, became the youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery in the United States, at one of the world's most prestigious hospitals--Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore.

For the young boy who was headed for a life of crime, and whose uncontrollable anger was a danger to his family and friends, Ben Carson's transformation to respected pediatric brain surgeon was nothing less than a miracle. Today, Dr. Carson performs up to five hundred surgeries per year.

Beth Usher is one of his patients. At five years of age, Beth was diagnosed with a rare disease that was destroying the left side of her brain. Her parents watched helplessly as she began having over one hundred seizures a day.

Beth's father, Brian Usher, remembers, "She'd be sitting, eating, and she'd go into a seizure and fall. There was a period of time where she looked like she was a battered child, because she was black-and-blue. She'd fall and her legs would be bruised, or her face. She had a couple of bad spills, so it was a nightmare."

As Beth's disease progressed, she became bedridden. And at age seven, without hope of recovery, the Ushers decided to put all their faith in Dr. Carson and a radical surgery that would remove the diseased half of Beth's brain.

Her mother, Kathy, recalls, "She said to me, 'Mom. I wish I could go through a magic mirror and come out a different person.' Ami that just crushed us so much. I said, 'But, Beth, you're such a beautiful person. What kind of person do you want to come out as?' And she said, 'A person who doesn't have seizures.' "

The delicate operation took over twelve hours, but Dr. Carson made Beth's wish come true, and today she enjoys a full and happy life-without seizures.

"It's been a long, slow process for Beth," says Brian, "but she's worked hard. She's a wonderful kid, with a great spirit. She's doing wonderfully today. We're obviously blessed with a wonderful child."

Kathy adds, "To give us back this bright, loving, intelligent life again is just amazing. It can't be anything but a miracle."

"Dr. Carson saved my life" says Beth. "I am forever in his gratitude. I think he's the most wonderful doctor ever."

Because of a miracle that changed the course of his life, Ben Carson has helped to change the course of countless other young lives. His journey, from troubled youth to renowned surgeon, is living proof of the miracles that life has to offer if we're willing to overcome our problems.

"Everybody's going to face obstacles in life," says Ben. "Success is determined not by whether you have obstacles, but how you relate to them. If you decide that that obstacle is going to stop you, it becomes a containment fence. It becomes your excuse, and it becomes your prison. If you determine that obstacle is a hurdle that you're going to jump over or go under or around or through, then you have discovered the key to success in life."