Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Dr. Benjamin S. Carson has served as the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, a candidate for President of the United States, and the seventeenth Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He currently serves as the founder and chairman of the American Cornerstone Institute. He is also the author of six bestselling books: Gifted Hands, Think Big, The Big Picture, One Nation, A More Perfect Union, and Created Equal, the last four of which he coauthored with his wife, Candy. They are the parents of three grown sons and grandparents to eight grandchildren. They live in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.

Gregg Lewis is an award-winning author and coauthor of more than fifty books, including Gifted Hands, The Ben Carson Story, Take the Risk and The Big Picture.

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No risk, pay the cost.
Know risk, reap the rewards.

In our risk-avoidance culture, we place a high premium on safety. We insure our vacations. We check crash tests on cars. We extend the warranties on our appliances. But by insulating ourselves from the unknown--the risks of life--we miss the great adventure of living our lives to their full potential.

Ben Carson spent his childhood as an at-risk child on the streets of Detroit, and today he takes daily risks in performing complex surgeries on the brain and the spinal cord. Now, offering inspiring personal examples, Dr. Carson invites us to embrace risk in our own lives. From a man whose life dramatically portrays the connection between great risks and greater successes, here are insights that will help you dispel your fear of risk so you can dream big, aim high, move with confidence, and reap rewards you've never imagined.

By avoiding risk, are you also avoiding the full potential of your life?

The surgery was as risky as anything Dr. Ben Carson had seen. The Bijani sisters--conjoined twins--shared part of a skull, brain tissue, and crucial blood flow. One or both of them could die during the operation. But the women wanted separate lives. And they were willing to accept the risk to reach the goal, even against the advice of their doctors …

As a child on the dangerous streets of Detroit, and as a surgeon in operating theaters around the world, Dr. Ben Carson has learned all about risk--he faces it on a daily basis. Out of his perilous childhood, a world-class surgeon emerged precisely because of the risks Dr. Carson was willing to take. In his compelling new book, he examines our safety-at-all-costs culture and the meaning of risk and security in our lives.

In our 21st-century world, we insulate ourselves with safety. We insure everything from vacations to cell phones. We go on low-cholesterol diets and buy low-risk mutual funds. But in the end, everyone faces risk, like the Bijani twins did with their brave decision. Even if our choices are not so dramatic or the outcome so heartbreaking, what does it mean if we back away instead of move forward? Have we so muffled our hearts and minds that we fail to reach for all that life can offer us--and all that we can offer life?

Take the Risk guides the reader through an examination of risk, including:
• A short review of risk-taking in history.
• An assessment of the real costs and rewards of risk.
• Learning how to assess and accept risks.
• Understanding how risk reveals the purpose of your lives.

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Take the Risk

Zondervan

Contents

Introduction..............................................................71. Risking Their Lives....................................................112. To Risk or Not to Risk?................................................193. When Is Risk Worth It?.................................................324. Life Itself Is a Risky Business........................................415. The Truth about Risk...................................................526. Growing Up "At Risk"...................................................677. My Risky Behavior Nearly Got the Best of Me............................788. Risks I Took That Changed My Life Forever..............................889. Four Simple Questions to Help Assess Any Risk..........................10610. Faith Is a Risk-Whatever You Believe..................................12511. Living Your Faith in an Uncertain World...............................13712. Navigating Professional Risks.........................................14913. My Personal Risks in the Face of Death................................16314. Taking Yourself Out of the Middle of Decisions........................17515. Parenting Perils?.....................................................18716. Public Risk (and the Beginning of Some Solutions).....................20417. Even Bigger Risks.....................................................218Conclusion: My Prescription in a Dangerous World..........................234

Chapter One

Baltimore to London to Singapore ...

I had no time to rest and recover after my twenty-hour journey. As soon as I arrived at the airport, I was whisked through customs, ushered into the backseat of a waiting Mercedes, and driven directly to Singapore's new and prestigious Raffles Hospital for a lengthy introductory meeting and then a light lunch with my surgical colleague hosts.

After these preliminaries, I was ready for my first appointment-the long-anticipated encounter with our special patients. It promised to be one of the most fascinating and unusual interviews of my life. I don't recall what my fellow neurosurgeon Dr. Keith Goh said to me as the entourage of physicians, nurses, and medical administrators rounded the corner in that hospital corridor-but I will never forget my first sight of Ladan and Laleh Bijani.

The young women waited to greet me in the hallway outside the suite of rooms that had been converted into a small apartment. They had lived there for a number of months while an army of medical doctors, specialists, and technicians examined them and conducted test after test after test. The Bijani twins wore the traditional Iranian attire of their homeland-long skirts, long-sleeved tops, muted colors, nothing over their faces, but a large scarflike cloth covering the thick, dark brown hair on their heads. Their warm and welcoming smiles struck me immediately.

Dr. Goh, a short, dark-haired Asian in his forties, quickly introduced me to the women. The Bijanis' English, which I'd been informed they had learned since arriving in Singapore seven months before, was broken and stilted but more than adequate for simple conversation.

After shaking hands with and greeting the first twin, I stepped around to greet the other one-a semi-awkward little side step necessary because Ladan and Laleh could not face me at the same time. Indeed, the twenty-nine-year-old sisters were a true medical rarity: identical twins conjoined at the head, their two skulls fused above and behind their ears so that their faces turned permanently away from each other at about a 130-degree angle.

The connection of their skulls held their heads nearly straight up and down. But with their ears touching and their shoulders and arms constantly rubbing, they were forced to lean their upper bodies toward one another and drop their inside shoulders to simultaneously create room to maneuver and maintain the balance necessary to move and stand together.

The result of a single fertilized egg that divides but never completely separates in the womb, conjoined twins (meaning they are attached at some point of their bodies) occur only once in every 200,000 births. All but a few are stillborn or die shortly after birth. Live craniopagus (from the Greek cranio, meaning "helmet," and pagus, meaning "fixed") twins are attached at the head and are the rarest of all-perhaps one in two million births. The odds of such twins living to two years of age are much, much slimmer-which made Ladan and Laleh's survival into adulthood a remarkable thing indeed.

Even more astounding is the fact that these young women had done far more than survive. Adopted by a compassionate Iranian medical doctor when their birth family couldn't care for them, Ladan and Laleh were given every possible opportunity to adapt and live as normal a life as possible. And adapt they did.

They attended elementary school with their peers. In time they grew, graduated from secondary school, and went on to university, where they studied journalism and pre-law. The two graduated from law school and were now fully qualified attorneys-which had recently precipitated a crisis resulting in added tensions between the sisters. Only Ladan wished to pursue a legal career, while Laleh had decided she wanted to go into journalism. Their physical bodies bound them together in a mutually shared existence, even as their two distinct personalities and now two very different life dreams-pulled them in different directions.

For years Ladan and Laleh had searched the world over for a neurosurgeon who would agree to operate and give them at least a chance of achieving their lifelong dream of pursuing two normal, individual, and distinctively different lives. Expert after expert refused to consider their request. Every doctor willing to examine their records told them that surgery would be too risky, that at least one of them-and probably both-would die. Their case was just too complex, they were too old, and the odds of a positive outcome were too low.

But the Bijanis refused to give up. When they read that Dr. Goh and his team had successfully separated eleven-month-old Nepalese craniopagus twins a couple of years before, they contacted him. After studying their medical records and concluding that a successful surgery just might be possible, he contacted me to ask if I'd be willing to help.

I had consulted and worked long-distance with Keith Goh on the Nepalese babies through the use of our virtual workstation at Johns Hopkins. I had also served as one of the primary surgeons for the first successful separation of occipital craniopagus twins (the Bender boys at Johns Hopkins in 1987). Ten years later, at the Medical University of South Africa, I was primary surgeon for the Zambian brothers Joseph and Luka Banda during the first separation of Type 2 vertical craniopagus twins in which both not only survived, but remained neurologically intact. Because of all those experiences, Dr. Goh wanted me to work with him on the surgery, and the Bijani twins themselves had also requested that I join their case.

I had actually declined their invitation when I'd first been contacted months before. The very fact that these young women had adapted so well and had already survived to the age of twenty-nine seemed to me reason...