Man Survives 15 Years with 4-Inch Pencil Lodged in His Head

A young Afghanistan man spent 15 years living with a pencil lodged in his head and sought medical assistance after suffering from severe headaches, constant cold and worsening vision in one eye, reports The Associated Press.

Surgeons at Germany's Aachen University Hospital reported that a scan conducted on the 24-year-old man revealed a 4-inch pencil stuck between his sinus and pharynx, which injured his right eye socket. 

The pencil was removed from the man's head only after a detailed examination with the help of computer tomography, reports German Media.

The man, whose identify remains hidden, says he has no clue as to how the pencil reached there, but remembers an incident which occurred in childhood that might have caused the accident. He recalls having had a bad fall as a child.

Surgeons who removed the pencil lodged in the man's head said that he is cured of his symptoms.

Reports according to BBC state that professor Frank Hoelzle of Aachen University presented this case for the first time at a medical conference in Essen, Tuesday.

This is not the first case of this type. A similar incident occurred last year with a 76-year-old woman, who took medical assistance from Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital in the U.K. for her unexplained weight loss and diarrhea. On conducting a CT scan, doctors found that a pen had been lodged in her stomach for decades. What surprised the doctors was that the pen they removed was able to write.

In another case, a German woman Margaret Wegner had a pencil lodged in her head for 55 years, which had caused chronic headaches and nose bleeding. The 3.15 inch pencil went straight through her cheek into her brain when she was 4 years old.

"It bored right through the skin and disappeared into my head," Wegner, now 59, told Bild, Germany's best-selling newspaper. "It hurt like crazy."