What’s That in Your Head?
It must have been some hit to force a paintbrush, bristles first, into a man’s head. Stranger still, the victim didn’t even realise it was there. Seems he turned up at the emergency room some 6 hours after the assault complaining of a headache and left cheek and eye soreness.
Even the medics couldn’t see the paintbrush. All that was evident at the time was a 5 cm cut below his left eye. But a CT scan painted a fuller picture, showing a cylindrical foreign body positioned from the left orbit to the right thalamus. Everyone assumed it was a piece of wood. Imagine the surgeon’s surprise when it turned out to be a paintbrush. And prehaps more amazing was that the patient suffered no neurological symptoms or side effects.
If you want to see what the CT looked like head over to .Street Anatomy for a collection of CT images.
But a paintbrush is not the oddest object to be found in the head. Neurophilosophy has an interesting post that reveals some more unusual penetrating brain injuries.
And then there’s Phineas Gage, a 19th century railway worker who survived having a meter long iron rod shot through his head. He became a both a medical curiosity and the means by which doctors were able to study the effects of damage to the brain. These days, Phineas Gage’s skull sits on display at The Warren Anatomical Musuem at Harvard Medical School where it is still the topic of much discussion.
It’s a fascinating story that you can listen to over at BBC Case Study.
Tags: brain injury, Oddities, penetrating brain injury, phineas gage
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