Woman has pencil removed from head after 55 years
After being plagued for 55 years with the torment of a pencil lodged in her head, a German woman has finally had it removed.
Margaret Wegner, now 59, was four-years-old when she fell while carrying the 8cm pencil, which went through her cheek and into her brain.
“It bored right through the skin and disappeared into my head,” Wegner told Germany’s best-selling newspaper, Bild. “It hurt like crazy.”
At the time the technology did not exist to safely remove the pencil, so Wegner had to live with it – and the chronic headaches and nosebleeds that it brought - for the next five-and-a-half decades.
But on Friday, Dr Hans Behrbohm, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Berlin’s Park-Klinik Weissensee, was able to use modern techniques to identify the exact location of the pencil so that he could determine the risks of removing it, and then take most of it out.
The operation was difficult because of the way the pencil had shifted as Wegner grew, Behrbohm said.
“This was something unique because the trauma was so old,” said Behrbohm, who has also operated to remove bullets from the brains of shooting victims, and glass from the brains of people involved in car accidents.
Though a 2cm piece of the pencil could not be removed, Behrbohm said it does not pose a danger.
And now Wegner, the wife of German boxing coach Ulli Wegner, will no longer have the headaches and nosebleeds, and her sense of smell should return soon, Behrbohm said.
“She shouldn’t suffer any longer,” he said.
