A 7-year-old boy from India is miraculously recovering after a freak accident caused a nearly 3-inch iron nail to pierce his brain.
The incident occurred in the Balrampur district of northern India, where the child — whose name has not been released — was playing when he tripped and fell directly onto the nail. The nail punctured his neck and traveled up into his brain, narrowly missing a major blood vessel, according to doctors at King George’s Medical University (KGMU) in Lucknow.
The boy was first taken to a local private hospital before being transferred to KGMU on May 16. Surgeons there spent four hours carefully removing the 2.27-inch nail, taking extreme precautions to avoid damaging the brain and the delicate network of nerves between the mouth and brain.
Medical teams called the child’s survival and recovery nothing short of remarkable, given how close the nail came to causing fatal damage.