A motorcycle taxi driver in Brazil had to get emergency treatment at a hospital that was three hours away after he was brutally attacked during a bar party in Agua Branca. Little did he know that the extent of his injuries included a knife embedded into the left side of his skull.
Juacelo Nunes de Oliveira, 39, got into a drunken altercation at a party when he was stabbed multiple times, apparently by several attackers. It took two and a half hours of surgery to remove the 11-inch knife from his skull and attend to other injuries he sustained in the fight.
According to reports, de Oliveira was stabbed three times in his torso and once in the head. One of his lungs was perforated, and the knife that was left in his head only stopped when it reached his left jaw.
De Oliveira was driven to a nearby facility first, but was then transferred to another emergency hospital in Teresina, which was 62 miles away. The whole time, he was not even aware that he had the knife still lodged inside his skull. Doctors attributed this to shock and intoxication.
Dr. Gilberto Albuquerque was one of the surgeons who operated on de Oliveira. He said the patient was extremely lucky to have survived the attack and to have sustained only minimal permanent damage.
"The knife crossed his head just behind the optical nerve, got very close to the olfactory nerve and (was) just a fraction from the gustatory nerve. He could have been blinded and could have lost his senses of smell and taste, but none of that happened and he is alive and healthy," he said.
CNN tweeted a graphic scan of the victim's skull:
Brazilian man stabbed in the head survives despite knife lodged in his skull for over 3 hours: https://t.co/nPtR7AWAAj pic.twitter.com/YvLPqcKANI
— CNN International (@cnni) January 4, 2015
Reports say that de Oliveira has made a full recovery and was released from the hospital yesterday, just five days after the altercation.
