Doctors successfully removed a 2.4-inch chopstick from the brain of an infant in China.
Hanyang, a one-year old infant, from Chaoyang City in China, was eating noodles with his parents when he stumbled and fell. The accident made the infant fall on the chopstick that made its ways to the brain via the nostrils and remained stuck for 10 days.
The child's parents took out the chopstick from the nose and rushed the infant to the hospital and got his wound treated. However, neither the parents nor the doctor attending to the child realized that the boy still had a part of the chopstick stuck to his brain. The child was asked to go home but the doctors did not do an x-ray.
"When we got home after our first visit to the hospital, my husband broke all the chopsticks in half and threw them away as we were worried something like this could happen again," says Yu Liao, Hanyang's mother.
However, after returning home the boy started vomiting and showed signs of lethargy. The boy was taken to the hospital again within a few days and then doctors realized that he had a part of the chopstick still inside his brain.
Dr. Li Shaoyi at the hospital revealed that the boy was lucky as the chopstick did not bother the child a lot. The body language or the child and his speaking ability were not affected with the chopstick, which was stuck at a portion of the brain, which is normally not functional.
The doctors at the hospital also revealed that the remaining piece of the chopstick measured about 6 centimeters. Following the removal of the chopstick, the boy started showing improvements immediately. However, the infant suffered from a brain infection and he had to be retained in the hospital for additional treatment.
This is not the first time that a child has fallen on a chopstick and ended up with a chopstick stuck to the brain through the nose. In September 2014, a two-year-old boy in Wuhan, China, was also rushed to the hospital after his father found that a chopstick had made its way to the brain via the nose. Fortunately, he also survived the entire ordeal.
Photo: Clare Bell | Flickr
