Hey Everybody,

Thank you for your interest in my memoir: I am Not Who I Once Was: An Unusual Path to Becoming a Surgeon

I have been working on this manuscript for the last several years and looking at publishing soon, but have decided to go through it again one chapter at a time to make another round of edits. I would like to share this experience with those who are interested in going through this journey with me. My plan is to release a chapter every week and share it with you. If you would like to read my progress, I would love to include you in this weekly newsletter- just subscribe for weekly chapters and updates.

I was inspired to put my personal history on paper by the many young people in our underserved communities whom I have encountered through outreach over the years. As an African-American male who became a teenage father at fifteen and raised in poverty by my disabled grandmother, I have felt a commitment to share my story. My hope is to not only inspire those who share some of the struggles I faced, but to also bring awareness to those who are nothing like me. I want to convey understanding to those who do not know what it is like to live in the struggle of poverty and discrimination. In this world that is dominated by access to information through the internet, many of my patients have “googled” my history beyond my medical training and encountered my interview with NPR or some of the other personal interviews that have been posted over the years about my past. I had concerns that once my patients had discovered what a troubled upbringing I had, it would scare them off. Who wants a former thug to be their surgeon? To my knowledge, I have not lost any business due to my history and have become one of the busiest surgeons in my Hospital. In fact, some of my patients who have no similarities at all with my background have shared that my story has inspired them.

There is large divide that exists in our country at this time and I believe that much of it comes from a lack of understanding what others are going through. Even as a surgeon who has taken care of countless trauma patients, many of who sustained traumatic brain injuries, it was not until my seventeen-year-old son nearly lost his life in a skate boarding accident that left him with a severe traumatic brain injury that I truly started to understand how difficult the struggle is for those patients and their families. There must be a better way for us as a society to come together. We tend to live our lives with blinders on, oblivious to what is going on around us. I have transcended from one extreme of society to another and encountered many struggles which I would not wish on anybody, but through these challenges, I have developed a greater sense of understanding and appreciation for the life we have. My hope is to share my story with others as a way to bridge the gap that is currently wedged deep within our country.

Here is chapter 1.

The Crack Years

When I dream or have nightmares, I still find myself there. My house was the one about halfway down the street with the big mulberry tree in the front yard. I am forever trapped within its cracked and dingy white walls which were filled with roach eggs. The underbelly beneath the house crawlspace was shared with all the rats and roaches. Berries from the tree were carelessly tracked in by those who frequented our home, leaving stains in the 70’s shag carpet that over time looked like they were part of the pattern. In my room, with my door closed, I was never afraid. I had a nail that was driven halfway through the door frame which was then bent in the shape of an “L.” I could twist the nail from side to side as a way of locking it. I thought I was a genius when I came up with that. It kept out the crazy people that frequented and lived in my home. Most of the crazy people were my family. The only one that was sane in my young eyes was mama.

The eyes of a crack head were always a bit off. For strangers who would come to the door asking for my dad or my uncle, you could always see the brief look of desperation because they were feening for a fix. Their eyes were not shy and probably unaware that they would scan all around the house as they came in, pausing briefly on things of potential value. As they passed by me, their sour smell was somehow still present even with holding my breath. They seemed unaware that I watched them. I knew better than to leave any of my toys laying around because they had a way of coming up missing whenever we had company.

My room was right next to the bathroom where they would smoke crack. “When I was between the ages of seven to thirteen, my father, my uncle, one of my aunts, and multiple “family friends” would use that bathroom as their sanctuary. Crack has a musky, sweet odor, one that could probably be mistaken for incense by the layperson; I was able to identify this smell by the time I was nine. The back wall of the closet in my room was thin and made up the other side of the bathroom wall. There were once nails that had been hammered through this wall to hold up various pictures over the years. After these pictures came down, along with the nails, the holes remained. From these holes I was able to watch them.

The glass crack pipe was the popular choice of smoking, but some would fall back on other various contraptions, I assume because they lost their pipe while on one of their delusional rampages. Considering the depth of their drug-induced insanity at times, the ingenuity always surprised me. It was like watching that old television show MacGyver: an old soda can, a toilet paper roll with some tin foil, you name it, give them the resources and they would make it into a crack pipe. Desperation is an understatement when it comes to describing people who are hooked on crack. Some of their make shift pipes would get so hot they burned their lips. So strange to watch it happen. They would react to the pain when the scorching hot pipe touched their lips, but then go straight back to it for another hit. Once they got that rock, it was going to get smoked.

When I first discovered the peepholes, I was afraid they would see me. I didn’t fully understand what I was watching. Sometimes I would shift to a different peephole to get a better view and the floor board would creek or the box that I was balancing one foot on would shift. Their head would shift and I would quickly avert my gaze and move my head. They were so focused on their goal of smoking that little white rock that the sound was not enough to distract them to the point of investigating.

Some acted stranger than others when they smoked crack. Most could try to act normal as an attempt to not let mama know what they were doing. Mama and my aunt Pat were the only ones that didn’t use. My father was by far the worst. At baseline, my father was already paranoid, but when he was using, you knew it. Over 300 pounds, pacing the floor, drenched in sweat, opening and closing doors, locking and unlocking windows. Even if I was in my room with the door closed, I could tell what was going on by the frantic sounds of his footsteps throughout the house. On several occasions his weight from each step reverberated through the baseboards enough to wake me from sleep. I remember feeling afraid there was an intruder that broke in or that we were being raided by the police. On multiple occasions, I would try to keep him from going outside when he was high. I wanted to protect myself from the embarrassment of the neighborhood kids seeing him in his “cracked out” state. One time, when I was around 9 years old, I thought I could use all my strength to keep that 300+ pound man in the house by force. I was mistaken.

I grabbed his arm by the elbow when he reached for the front door. I was met with a quick glance through eyes that didn’t seem to recognize who I was. It wasn’t my dad, but a monster who somehow stole my voice like in one of my nightmares where I was unable to scream. My mouth opened, but the sound remained trapped in my lungs making my chest feel like it was about to explode. I was thrown on the couch, unable to even exhale. My muscles involuntarily tightened as I curled into a ball, preparing to be hit. My father had never struck me, but everything in that moment seemed as though this man with the empty unrecognizing eyes was not my father. The crack was like rabies to his mind. I was facing Stephen King’s Cujo in the form of a man.

Instead of feeling the impact of a fist, I felt his hands going down to my waist. He started to burr his huge hand into my pockets. His fingers felt like multiple little mice had entered my pocket and were looking for some other way to escape. I didn’t initially understand what was happening, but my fear immediately transformed into anger which broke my paralysis. My scream finally escaped as a young boys shrill which could probably not be distinguished from that of a girl. He was not fazed by my screams. He pulled my front pockets inside out. His focus then shifted as his eyes showed a feeling of hope. He picked at a white ball of lint in my pocket and closely inspected it. He held me down with one hand while the other raised the potential crack rock up to the light of the window in his field of view. As I screamed helplessly on the couch, mama came from behind him, swinging a frying pan, yelling at him to get out. I think she may have struck him at least one time because he quickly retreated out the front door in the way that an injured bear, shot by a hunter, would scurry off into the woods. A couple years passed before seeing him again.