They weighed a combined 8 pounds and 14 ounces. She considered opening up the window of a tall building and jumping out. “I thought: ‘My God, what will they look like, how will they live?’ ” “I saw the babies noticed only a huge head with two faces,” she told Bunte. “I wanted to kill them and myself as well,” she said, according to Carson’s best-selling book “Gifted Hands.” She had just learned that her babies were stuck together and felt as if “a sick, ugly monster” was writhing inside of her. In January 1987, Theresia Binder was eight months pregnant and suicidal. Why did I have them separated?” the boys’ mother, Theresia Binder, told the Freizeit Revue, a sister publication of Bunte, in November 1993. A search through its archives, in addition to new interviews conducted with members of the family and Carson’s medical colleagues, shows a more complete and complicated portrait of an event that shaped the lives of those involved. The German magazine Bunte signed an exclusivity deal with the family until the boys turned 18. Updates on the children were limited after they returned to Germany following the surgery. As a doctor, no matter how far we push medical science, we cannot conquer all pain.” When reached for comment this week, Carson said: “The great reward of using your talents to save a child’s life can be a tremendous high, but you often find that there is nothing you can do to stop the pain of a patient’s journey through life. “But as far as having normal children, I don’t think it was all that successful.” “In a technological ‘star wars’ sort of way, the operation was a fantastic success,” Carson said in an Associated Press article from 1989. And although Carson and his team achieved something unprecedented, with long-term benefits for science, it did not result in a happy ending for the Binders. Like many stories from the frontiers of medical science, it’s a hard one to fit into an inspirational narrative - a tale of risk and loss and brutally tough options. The then-35-year-old doctor walked out of the operating room that day and stepped into a spotlight that has never dimmed, from the post-surgery news conference covered worldwide, through his subsequent achievements in his medical career, to publishing deals and a lucrative career as a motivational speaker - all paving the way to his current moment as a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.īut while Carson frequently deploys anecdotes from his compelling life story - a hardscrabble childhood in Detroit, his climb to the Ivy League, his journeys through spiritual faith and advanced medicine - he only occasionally cites and never dwells on the story of Benjamin and Patrick Binder. More than any other moment in a dazzling career, the separation of the Binder twins launched the stardom of Ben Carson. “But I also know that if this was a success, if things go well, it would make his reputation, would make him famous, that people would grow up trying to emulate him.”ĭonlin Long and Ben Carson speak at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore after the surgery that separated conjoined twins in September 1987. If things go badly it would be terrible for the young doctor’s career,” Long recalled this month. “Part of me thought, maybe I should take the knife. Carson, he had already decided, should make the crucial cut. But Donlin Long, head of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, refused the gesture. It was a sign of deference and respect - and perhaps, a measure of caution. And when it came time on that day in 1987 to put a knife to the large vein connecting them - the most fraught step in the groundbreaking operation to separate infant conjoined twins - Benjamin Solomon Carson, the brilliant young pediatric neurosurgeon who had overseen the babies’ case from the start, offered his scalpel to his boss. For hours they had prepped the two tiny bodies perilously joined at the head. For months, a team of physicians and nurses had rehearsed for the delicate surgery.
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