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Pastor Carlton Duck: Fighting to the Finish

by | Dec 2024

“I’m 77 years old, and I’m not about to quit,” Pastor Carlton Duck said, and he proves that statement every time he cuts his grass, drives his car, or stands up Sunday morning to preach a sermon at Gethsemane Baptist Church. Two amputated legs and a pacemaker haven’t been able to stop him from living his best life or from using that time to encourage and uplift others. 

Lynchburg has been Duck’s home his whole life, barring the 12 years he spent serving in the United States Air Force. In 1990, he went into ministry full time, living a normal life as a pastor and a minister in the community. All of that changed in a few months. 

“For all the years that I had been in ministry, I was on the other side of the bed — being in the hospitals, praying with people before surgeries, during sicknesses, things of that nature,” Duck said. “In 2022, I found myself in the bed.” 

He’d had a heart attack and had to have two valves replaced, as well as a quadruple bypass. His heart, Duck said, was so bad that the doctor said he just did not know how Duck lived. He spent a month in the intensive care unit and nearly as long in acute rehab, but his trials weren’t over yet. There was an infection in his feet and legs, and it was spreading. If it reached his heart, he would die. 

“[The doctor] said, ‘What’s your decision?’ I said, ‘Well, what decision do I have? Die or have my legs amputated.’ So I returned back to the general hospital,” Duck said. “I had my left leg amputated on a Saturday, had my right leg amputated on a Tuesday.” 

He now has two steel prosthetic legs, from the knee down. The pacemaker came the next year as a way to regulate his heartbeat.

“My church calls me ‘The Bionic Duck,’” Duck said.

His experience did more than change him physically, however. Duck said it changed the way he saw suffering, both Christ’s and others’, and gave him greater compassion toward– all the people in daily pain.

“To go through this really made the reality set in that there are real people who are hurting tremendously bad and suffering — and I still suffer,” Duck said. “When you have walked in that path and you have felt that similar pain it becomes more real [to] you.”

Now he encourages patients in the hospital and people everywhere with a new message, shown by his own struggle and subsequent victory. Duck first learned to be independent in the Air Force, learned it again when his wife died, and now practices it every day as he manages his house on two feet.

“Through the trials and the valleys that you face in life — that you must have that faith and determination, you must stay in the ring, you must keep your gloves on — continue to fight and realize that the bell has not been sounded, you still have life in your body, and you need to fight to the finish,” Duck said.

It was Duck’s family, community, and faith that helped him keep his determination, even when most people thought he was going to die. His daughter and son-in-law, Tiffany and Drew Dearing, stood over his bed every day even when he was unconscious, Duck said, and encouraged him to keep fighting. The doctors and nurses who worked with him were just as important to his recovery. Many, he said, he is now close friends with.

“I consider Dr. Saum one of my best friends, and not just as a surgeon but as a tremendous man, and they were all instrumental in my healing,” Duck said. “My daughter and my son-in-law were very instrumental, and of course my God was powerfully influential in my healing and what happened to me.”

Duck surpassed all expectations. People expected him to retire, and he didn’t. He was told he may never preach again, and he does. People in that situation need to take life one day at a time, Duck said, fight through that day and try to get out of it the greatest lesson in life they can: that value can be found through their life, their faith, and their family.

“I’m not ashamed of my steel,” Duck said. “I’m not ashamed to put on a pair of shorts — to show my legs and show people that you can get up after being knocked down, and you can get back in the stream of life, and you can live.” GN

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