Man spends 24 hours with knife blade in his head

The blade pierced through the temporal bone and plunged inside the skull almost entirely

Doctors of a local hospital in the Vologda region of Russia removed a 9-cenimeter long blade from the man's ear, having preserved the patient's life and audition. It took only 20 minutes for the operation to last.

”I thought that I bumped into a bough while sleeping. I was trying to take it out with a finger, but could not do anything,” patient Alexander Komarov said. The man could not recollect what was happening to him before the accident; he only said that had had a little alcohol.

Having washed blood off his temple and ear, Alexander traveled home on a bicycle. He was not scared of the increasing pain in the head. “I always ride my bicycle fast, although this time I was traveling for two hours – my head was too heavy,” the man said. “I would make several stops on my way home, feel the strange metal pin in the ear and keep on riding. When I finally got home, I went to bed.”

Alexander Komarov went to a local hospital the next day. “It was not a bough. It was a sharp blade, which was nine centimeters long,” Aleksey Pluzhnov, an ENT doctor said. The blade pierced through the temporal bone and plunged inside the skull almost entirely. Doctors concluded that the blade was embedded in the man's skull as a result of a rather strong physical impact, The Premier newspaper wrote.

Doctors of the local hospital did not venture to operate the man because the risk was too high: a cluster of nerves and blood vessels was only several millimeters away from the foreign body. The patient was sent to the central hospital of the Vologda region.

The pin had been resting in the man's head for more than 24 hours by that time. Doctors had to carefully hold the top of the blade and take it out of the head not to touch nearest nerves, blood vessels and bones. Chief medical specialists of the ENT department of the Vologda regional hospital, Valentina Burmistrova, performed several subtle cuts around the wound and meticulously removed the blade with forceps. Minor bones of the middle ear, the ear-drum and other organs of the hearing remained intact at the end of the successful operation. The operation only damaged several nerves, which resulted in a slight facial defect.

The patient can hear everything very well now. Doctors said that such unique occurrences happen once in a hundred years. “The patient suffered minimal injuries, although the wound was extremely life-threatening. The facial defect will vanish later, and the patient's audition was not damaged at all,” Dr. Alexander Kuzmin said.

Police officers from Alexander Komarov's settlement are waiting for the lucky patient to return home to investigate the details of the accident.