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.

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?

[gl4ss]

and nobody did a xray.

but it's china, a developing nation.