If this story wasn't in the NY Times, I wouldn't believe that it was true (though I do see that it's actually an AP story picked up by the Times). Patrick Lawler went to the dentist about a toothache and found out he had a four-inch nail lodged inside his head. It came from a nail gun he had been using a few days before. He hadn't realized that the gun had shot a nail inside his head! The x-ray of the nail inside his head (see thumbnail to right) reminds me of the x-ray picture (below) that I have on my Hoax Photo Test showing a fork inside a woman's stomach. In her case she swallowed the fork while inserting it down her throat in order to remove a cockroach that had somehow got lodged down there. True story.
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XeerZ
They are trained to spot these anomalies including buttons, shrapnel, pins, coinage and less dense items that can masquerade as pathology. Many items are actually not in the body -the radiographic technician forgot to tell the person to take off clothing, etc.
Some are pretty strange; many, ahem..., deviant in nature including a tiny spinal column or coke bottle visible in the nether regions.
HAVE FUN !!!
Stork, I just read your account of your father-in law's autopsy and OMG! That's quite disturbing. Maybe he was working on a home erectile disfunction kit!
I once stepped on a nail (it was sticking up from an old board), and I knew immediately and for many weeks afterward that it had gone through my foot.
Maybe he was trying to do something stupid, the gun went off & he thought maybe the nail went flying someplace, rather than into his head.
From what I gathered, the nail was in a sort of empty space in his head, where nothing major was, and therefore he was quite lucky. Kind of reminds me of the duck (goose?) that got hit with an arrow through the head from some mean person, and the arrow went through an empty space that nothing major was in, and so he lived. A veterinarian kindly removed the arrow and let it go after it was pretty much all healed. Amazing stories, both of these!
Well, no, not if it was sticking out of your face or head. That's the rub--in this case, the nail had lodged itself in the roof of this man's mouth. When the story says it almost put out his eye, they mean from *beneath* the eye socket.
He thought the pain was due to being slammed in the face with a nail gun, and was eating ice cream for it, and went to a dentist, who found it.
That part of the story is actually plausible. It's what this guy was doing with a nail gun pointed at his face that has me scratching my head. Contrary to what you see on the Simpsons, nail guns don't fire nails like bullets; the range is pretty short, and like someone else explained, the metal guard has to be depressed against something.
But then, if this guy was smart, he'd have a better job, perhaps.
If I swallowed a cockroach, I'd shrug, have a beer, and take a nap. It's all just protein--digesting a cockroach doesn't hurt dogs, or geckos, for that matter. My stomach can handle a roach, but not a fork.
I know it's gross, but I eat hot dogs and I don't think about what's in them....
For those curious, I recently saw an 2-view opposing skull x-ray of a man who had been standing on a ladder when some building material fell from the roof above and crashed around his head. He reported having a headache but finished his work day. That evening he took some ibuprofen for his headache and went to bed. The next morning in shower he noticed a small amount of blood on his fingers. His wife looked and saw a flat piece of metal on his scalp, which prompted a visit to the hospital.
In a short time the X-rays confirmed that the man had a three-inch nail lodged vertically in his skull and deep into his frontal lobe. Purportedly, the man was more annoyed than worried and just wanted the attending docs to "just get the damn thing out!" The nail was removed without immediately evident harm and the man was back to work within days. Simply amazing, eh?
>>>unless you're an idiot, or the nail somehow severed the sensory nerves to your head<<<
The brain itself has no pain receptors, so pain would only be percieved superficially. There's a fairly famous story of a railroad worker (Silas Something-or-other) in the 1800s who had a rail road spike blown thru his head after a premature dynamite explosion. It entered the roof of his mouth and exited his superior skull. He lived, but his personality was drastically altered from a mild-mannered, pious type, to a wanton terrorizer of women with many other social oddities. Go figure.
Lastly, (sheesh I didn't mean to write so much...) all of these stories share a commonality: that they all took place in the frontal lobe of the brain, which is primarly responsible for elements of your personality not the more basal functions of sustaining life. To an extent, oblitering the frontal lobe is equivilent to a lobotomy- once heraled as an ingenious surgery, it's little more than sticking a rod up someone's nose so far that you swirl it around inside thier brain.