Carl's Story

For all of Carl’s life, little things have made a big difference.

Starting early in his childhood, growing up in New Orleans, his parents probably thought the words they said to him were little things. But to a 5 year old boy, words like “You’ll never amount to anything,” become very big things.

But verbal, and physical abuse from his parents and grandparents weren’t the only obstacle in young Carl’s life. “I started out as a drug addict,” he says, explaining how his mother and grandmother put him on barbiturates for epileptic seizures. The oldest of 3 children, he left New Orleans the first chance he got. “At 15, after it was clear that our mother didn’t want us anymore, we left her one by one,” explains Carl. “We left as teenagers to get away from her.”

Carl’s father had moved to Houston, so Carl came here one summer and helped him with a variety of jobs – such as, making ice cream deliveries and working on a farm. His life was relatively stable until he started school in the fall. There, a variety of behavioral problems surfaced. As Carl describes it, “I lashed out whenever and wherever I could….I didn’t just get into a fist fight. I tried to hurt people.”

Needless to say, Carl was expelled – repeatedly. And although he never went to jail, he was in and out of juvenile probation throughout junior high and high school and he never graduated. After school, Carl managed to do, as he describes it, “a little of everything” – as a warehouseman, construction worker, and stage hand, and even working at a TV station on the conversion to a digital signal.

In 2004, the event that forced Carl into homelessness was when he was robbed and his wallet with his ID and other papers slipped out of his pants. He might have applied for a replacement ID, but he knew a warrant had been issued for his arrest for hot checks, so he assiduously avoided the courthouse.

The result was that he couldn’t work, and didn’t have transportation. He ended up on the street, “camping out” on sidewalks, and under freeway bridges. He spent a month sleeping behind the Houston Public Library until “security got wise and ran us off.”  And he even “camped” on the Allen Parkway median.

“I used my bag as a pillow. All I had was a couple of blankets that I had saved. I put one blanket on newspapers on the ground, and the other I used to cover up with,” Carl shrugs. “That was home.”

But after spending 6 months on the street, he finally asked for help. With the help of a variety of counselors, and social workers from several Houston organizations, Carl finally got off of drugs and alcohol, found a place to live, and even got his GED.

That’s when he noticed pain he hadn’t felt before. Earlier, even before he was homeless, he had been to a few appointments with Dr. Buck, President of HHH. As Carl describes it, “I met Dr. Buck by accident, but maybe it wasn’t an accident after all.”

This time Dr. Buck ordered several test and biopsies and discovered that, in addition to Carl’s various medical conditions, he also had cancer. Carl remembers when Dr. Buck told him about the cancer. “Most doctors, if they had a guy like me as a patient, they might not take the trouble to tell me about it. They might get someone else to do it. But Dr. Buck came up to my room and said, ‘I’m sorry. We’re going to do everything we can.’ I appreciated that. It might have been a little thing to him, but it was a big thing to me.”

Now, Carl is taking that message to students at Baylor College of Medicine. He talks about his background, and what led him to a life of addiction on the street.

His basic message: the ‘little things’ you do as a physician can be a very ‘big thing’ for a patient. It’s a good reminder for all of us.