14 DAY TRIAL // Not too long ago, doctors in China operated on a toddler who had a chopstick stuck inside his head and somehow managed to save his life. What's more, they say that, as far as they can tell, the infant is well on his way to recovery.
This most shocking incident is said to have occurred in the city of Wuhan in China's Hubei Province. The child was brought to the hospital by his father, who claims that he still does not know how the boy impaled himself.
Not the simplest surgery in the books
Brain surgery is never easy-peasy. It's even more complicated when it's about removing a stick or some other foreign object from inside a child's head. Still, surgeons in China somehow found a way to save this 2-year-old's life.
As shown in the photo accompanying this article, the chopstick that nearly killed the infant, identified as Huang Zicheng, went through his nose and into his head. It is estimated that, all in all, it went about 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) into his brain.
As mentioned, the child's father claims that he is clueless about the circumstances of this accident. Thus, he says that, while he was busy carrying out some chores, he heard his child let out a scream. When he turned around, he discovered that the child had rammed a chopstick up his nose.
“I turned around and was shocked to find that the long stick had gone into his head from his nose,” the 2-year-old boy's father, whose named has not yet been shared with the public, said in a statement, as cited by Metro.
Shortly after the 2-year-old was brought to the hospital, doctors turned to CAT scans to figure out exactly what was happening inside his head. They found that they could not simply pull on the chopstick and hope for the best, and decided to operate on the child.
In it understood that the surgical intervention during which the child had the chopstick removed from inside his brain took about 4 hours to complete. There were no complications, and the 2-year-old boy is expected to soon make a full recovery.
A stroke of good luck
2-year-old Huang Zicheng managed to survive this horrific experience not just because the doctors who operated on him knew exactly where to cut to safely remove the chopstick. On the contrary, a stroke of good luck was also involved.
Thus, it appears that, when penetrating his brain, the stick somehow failed to hit any major nerves or arteries. Hence, the boy stayed alive long enough for doctors to be able to operate on him, and has high chances to soon return to his usual life.