Man Has Knife Removed From Brain After Four Years

abhatt writes "From the article: 'A man in China complaining of headaches and strange taste in his mouth was found to have a 4-inch knife buried in his brain. Doctors examining Li Fu realized the blade had been in his head for four years without him realizing it. The 37-year-old from Yunnan Province suffered a stabbing during a robbery in 2006 while he worked as a cab driver.'"

Comments

Good thing...

[monoqlith]

they didn't do an MRI.

Yep.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

I'd imagine having a knife in your brain could give you a pretty bad headache.

How do you miss that?

[Fluffeh]

I just can't understand this:

Taxi driver comes into ER after being stabbed in the head.
Doctor examines, administers care, inserts sutures etc etc and the one I don't get MISSES 4 INCH SECTION OF BLADE still in the mans head?

I mean seriously, when a kid gets a gravel knee, the first thing you do is check to make sure that all the gravel bits are out before you put a bandaid/bandage on! Break some glass? Check to make sure all the glass bits are out of the cut!

Surely, you would apply this same logic to a stabbing in the head?

Re:How do you miss that?

[Shikaku]

*stab* *knife snaps from perpendicular force* *knife piece travels inside wound for some reason* *Knife wound looks like a normal stab wound* *Victim goes unconscious right at stabbing due to trauma* And nobody notices because the attacker kept the broken knife/it was lost, the victim can't remember it and heals thinking the pain is part of the wound recovery.

Re:How do you miss that?

[RockDoctor]

Shikaku has enumerated a perfectly reasonable scenario.

when a kid gets a gravel knee, the first thing you do is check to make sure that all the gravel bits are out before you put a bandaid/bandage on!

One of my first memories (from around 20 years before MRI or CAT scanning were invented) is of my father using a pair of forceps to pull a cm-long piece of gravel out of my forehead, around a week after I'd learned a messy lesson about tobogganing down steep grassy banks onto the level ground of a gravel path (hidden under the snow, it must be said). Actually I have a stronger memory of staggering along the path back to my friend's house, seeing through a curtain of blood ; friend's Mum was a nurse, off duty, so she got me to A&E sharpish ("Accident & Emergency"). They simply didn't see the fragment that was deeply buried, and it's presence only became clear when that puncture wound continued to fester when the others were clearing up. Dad was changing the dressings one day, thought he could feel a lump, and got his forceps.

It can be hard to see all the little bits of shit in a wound.

Break some glass? Check to make sure all the glass bits are out of the cut!

There has been at least one case I've heard of where a patient had a (successful, several times) scheme of going to A&E with an "accidental glass cut" to get it treated, then a while later pushing glass fragments back into the wound (after sterilising them? Possibly, she was otherwise careful to avoid dangerous practices.), returning to the same A&E department claiming continued pain from the wound, and then making a claim for having been mis-treated at the first visit. IIRC, she got away with it several times at several locations, until the record-keeping caught up with her.

Since then, yes, even minor wounds are routinely X-rayed ; not to find missing fragments (which would have happened anyway, if the clinician suspected fragmentation), but to document that the wound is clear to keep the lawyers happy.

It's a sad, sad statement on the world.

Surely, you would apply this same logic to a stabbing in the head?

Why do you assume that the A&E centre had an X-ray machine?

I may live in the western world, but I've worked in places where the (unofficial) health advice is "If you can't drag your bleeding body to the airport and get your ass out of the country, crawl into an alley and die as a safer option than going to the hospital".

You may not enjoy thinking about living in a place like that and not having the option of dragging your bleeding body up the steps of the airplane. It's sobering.

Re:How do you miss that?

[petermgreen]

Since then, yes, even minor wounds are routinely X-rayed ; not to find missing fragments (which would have happened anyway, if the clinician suspected fragmentation), but to document that the wound is clear to keep the lawyers happy.

I remeber I smashed a windows and opened a massive flap on my finger, the hospital flushed it out, x-rayed it, closed it up etc. For a long time afterwards there was pain there when presure was put on it and things felt a bit hard on the skin surface but I didn't think much of either.

Anyway some time down the line while picking at it (yeah I probablly shouldn't do that but it's a habbit i've always had) I felt something way too hard to be skin, as I continued picking at it I revealed a small peice of glass which I levered out with a knife. Soon afterwards there was no more pressure from putting pain on it.

Re:How do you miss that?

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Doctors take some xrays, as they should do after any kind of head trauma, find the blade, remove it.

Re:How do you miss that?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Communist China, the doctor gets paid the same whether he removes the blade or not.

Re:How do you miss that?

[Anonymous Coward]

you forget this is china, we have cheap goods for a reason.

> Doctors take some xrays, as they should do after any kind of head trauma, find the blade, remove it.

Re:How do you miss that?

[Nadaka]

...Soon afterwards there was no more pressure from putting pain on it.

Glad that was fixed and you can go back to putting all the pain on it that you want.

Re:How do you miss that?

[gl4ss]

and nobody did a xray.

but it's china, a developing nation.

Phineas Gage

[dido]

I wonder if the guy's case is anything like the celebrated case of the railroad construction foreman Phineas Gage, who survived having a large iron rod go completely through his head. I wonder if he's experienced any changes in personality similar to Gage's case, in addition to the headaches and the strange tastes.

Concealed weapon?

[ragnar the nerd]

What would have happened to this guy at LAX security? With the boneheaded "security" people and federal police and judges and other bureaucrats in the US, I guess he was lucky to live in China.

I had this happen to m

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was about 7 I took a nasty spill on my bike, sliding down os driverway on my forearms and knees about 20 feet. My mother scrubbed out my wounds and bandaged me up. All better, but then when I was 13 I started getting acne, which was not unusual, but what was unusual was that one pimple on my left thigh. After a few weeks it erupted, bring not so much pus, but a small piece of gravel that had been in my thigh for 6 years. Now that I'm 50 I'm still expecting more foreign matter to be expelled.