The Story of Benny
Benjamin Carson as a boy was raised
without a father; he had part of his high school education at a school where
blacks like him were considered as never-do-wells.
In 1961, bennie as his mother fondly called could not even answer a
single question correctly; while in the same class a fellow student answered 30
questions correctly. You can imagine, amongst the failures bennie was regarded as a failure, funny
as it may seem but by 1987, the same bennie
was regarded as the best amongst the best in paediatric neurosurgery.
The big question is “how did bennie’s story change?” many factors
contributed to his success story which includes inspiration from his mother. At
a time when Bennie failed many of his courses and did badly in the rest his
mother told him “bennie! You
aren’t a failure, you are a smart boy you just aren’t using your smartness...and
if you keep on failing you will spend the rest of your life mopping floors,
that’s not what I want for you and that’s not what God wants for you either”. she went on to tell him ‘harness your
imagination; make full use of it and you can be whatever you want to be as long
as you’re willing to work at it’. She also helped him to maximize his study
time by making him watch only two programmes on TV every week, giving him time
to read and report two books each week.
Bennie had some weaknesses, the most
prominent of them being his temper, he was hot-tempered. once angered he becomes vicious, he
once attempted hitting his mother but was stopped by his elder brother. He also
got close to stabbing a fellow student. He did one admirable thing about this
weakness, he asked God to take away his hot-temper.
Gradually Bennie’s grades got better
and better until at 8thgrade when he won the price for the student
with best achievement award. After high school he was admitted on scholarship
to the University of Yale to study neurosurgery. The university had its own
challenges for Bennie, at a point he was at the verge of losing his scholarship
due to bad grades. When faced with academic challenges Bennie normally
remembers his mother’s saying “you can do anything anybody else can do only you
can do it even better”
Bennie graduated from university and
was accepted at John Hopkins hospital as a resident. In 1985 he was brought to
limelight after successfully carrying out hemispherectomy, that is removal of
the seizure prone part of the brain, the left hemisphere. He performed this
operation on a child believing that the other brain cells will take up the
functions of the left hemisphere. Today hemispherectomy is now an acceptable
treatment.
In 1987, he achieved a landmark when
with a crew of 50 doctors he separated the first craniopagus twins (Siamese
twins shearing the same head) with both of them alive. The major challenge in
separating these twins was excessive blood loss leading to death of at least
one of the twins. Bennie figured out that the heart can be stopped for about an
hour without any danger, this he did and spent the hour reconstructing their
blood vessels so that when their hearts were started no much blood loss
occurred. This was a major breakthrough in medicine, one that bennie will always be remembered for.
He was ranked the best paediatric neurosurgeon in the world.
Looking at it from the history angle,
this is the same person that once couldn’t answer one question in a test. His
story changed because he was ready to make a change. Believe me, no matter how
bad things look now, if you are really ready to make a change, your story can
change for the better
Remember “you can do anything anybody else
can do only you can do it even better”
