A 76-year-old man has survived a delicate surgery in which a four-inch-long rusty knife blade that got stuck inside his head after he had been stabbed 26 years ago was successfully removed, giving him respite now.
The ‘miracle man’ simply identified as Duorijie is a farmer from rural China from the rural county of Haiyan in China’s northwestern Qinghai Province.
Reports say he was stabbed in the head in 1994, during a violent attack, and had reportedly been living with a long knife blade stuck in his brain ever since.
Although he survived the attack, Duorijie had been experiencing all kinds of troublesome symptoms because of the knife blade in his brain, such as a lost vision in his right eye and chronic headaches.
According to Odditycentral.com, he initially sought medical assistance in 2012, when his headaches became too hard to bear. However, after taking X-ray of his skull and shockingly discovering the four-inch-long blade stuck inside the farmer’s brain, doctors decided that attempting to remove the foreign object was too dangerous, so they declined to operate on him.
God is so good, the 76-year-old was recently rediscovered when doctors touring the countryside of Qinghai Province last month learnt about his plight and decided to help him.
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“When we found him while on a medical tour of Qinghai, we learned that experts had decided on more conservative treatment, prescribing only painkillers,” Doctor Zhang Shuxiang said. “But his symptoms began [to get] increasingly severe and unbearable. Due to the limitations of local hospitals, we decided to bring him to Shandong for the best possible treatment.”
He was flown to more than 3,000 kilometres for free treatment although he was not financially sound to pay the medical bills. The doctors chose to be compassionate towards Duorijie because his condition made him lose vision in his right eye sometimes, and also suffered near-full paralysis in his left arm and leg.
CT scans and X-rays performed at the hospital of Shandong First Medical University in Jinan showed that the blade was located at the base of the patient’s skull, lodged against his eye socket and pressing against his optic nerve. Removing it would be difficult, but according to chief neurosurgeon Dr Liu Guangcun, it was “the only way to resolve the pensioner’s suffering once and for all.”
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On April 2 and 8, Duorijie underwent two delicate surgical procedures to have the long knife blade removed.
“During the two-hour surgery, surgeons removed the rusty 10-centimetre (4-inch) blade,” Dr Zhang told reporters. “On April 8, he underwent a second operation to clean his wound. He’s recovering well and can already walk around on his own. His head pains are gone, and he has regained full sight in his right eye. He can also open his mouth and no longer coughs.”
Speaking about his ordeal, the 76-year-old farmer said “I couldn’t laugh, yawn or even cough. The doctors have given me a second chance at life and ended my nightmare of more than 20 years.”