Gifted Hands The Ben Carson Story (Chpts. 15-18)

Gifted Hands
By: Ben Carson with Cecil Murphy
Pages: 147-191

• Summary

Maranda ended up living through the surgery. She was the first of many other successful hemispherectomy with only one death. After this happened a TV show did a part on hemispherectomies and Ben Carson was asked to appear on the Phil Donahue Show. He didn't accept this because he didn't want to become a celebrity doctor and didn't want to start believing that he was really good.
The one death was a girl named Jennifer. She was only 5 months old and having lots of seizures. When he had completed with Jennifer's surgery he had gone home but was called back in for her. There was no explanation to what happened because he had done everything he could. This was the most emotional procedure for him.
A 13-year old girl named Denise Baca had a hemispherectomy by Ben Carson. Critics forbade anyone to do any surgical procedures on her because there were too many risks. Ben and some others didn't agree so they waited when the critics were gone to perform the surgery and it was a success. After that experience he learned that when a person knows what they're capable of doing something it doesn't matter who tries to stop them.
There were three cases that Ben Carson knows will remain unforgettable to him.
1. A 4-year-old girl named Bo-Bo Valentine. Her eyes had dilated so Ben Carson decided to do =a craniectomy immediately. One of the surgeons Carson admired had told him to not do the surgery because it would've been a waste of his time. After the surgery Bo-Bo was in a coma for a few days. Then she started to recover and is now fully recover.
2. Charles was a 10-year-old and had been hit by a car. When his eyes dilated he needed to have surgery but his mother didn't want him to be cut up in pieces. But when Carson explained to her that Charles would have a chance if he had surgery she agreed. After the surgery he stayed in a coma for a week with no change. This case was brought at a conference that Carson was not a part of and many thought that the surgery had been a very bad idea. Charles fully recovered before a full month after his surgery.
3. This was the case of Danielle. She was 5 months old. She had a grown a tumor the size of her head and it grew beyond the skin with pus coming out of it. The people that were a part of this team was a plastic surgeon, Dr. Dufresne, and Lewis Strauss who were supposed to come up with a chemotherapy program to kill the malignant (dangerous) cells. During the surgery Dr Dufresne came in when the skin needed to be closed over. The surgery was a success. Then she died.
A man named Craig had a condition called Von hippel-Lindau (VHL) which caused multiple brain tumors. He and his wife Susan had been through so much. Craig was expected to die in a few years from all the brain tumors. Carson decided to do a surgery on him to remove a brain tumor that was near his brain stem. He completed the surgery but Carson hypothesized that he would end up with one side of his body paralyzed and would die in a couple of months. This crushed Susan because she had been through a lot with Craig and after all of that he was going to die. However after the second part of the surgery after all hope was gone from Carson the next day he came to find Craig up and functioning normally. Craig had gotten the miracle he had asked for. His condition was no more!

• Quotation

"It made me think of how people take simple things for granted" (Carson 192).

• Reaction

This is when Carson's surgery on Craig was successful. Susan and Craig went back home and she called Carson to tell him that Craig had eaten a plate of speghetti and actually swallowed. With VHL it took him an hour and a half to eat a plate of food and he couldn't swallow. I thought that this was true because a lot of things happen to people and they take it for granted. People should take more time to appreciate the things they have in their lives.