In 2024, 50-year-old Yuri, a resident of Rylsk, a small town in Russia’s Kursk region, was chopping maple branches in his garden when he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his left eye. He wasn’t wearing protective goggles, so he immediately realized that a piece of wood must have struck his eye, but because the pain eventually subsided, he figured it wasn’t a serious injury.
Time passed, and Yuri forgot all about the woodcutting incident, but he continued to experience occasional flashes of pain and discomfort in his left eye. He even sought medical help, but the treatments prescribed by various ophthalmologists didn’t seem to help much. In fact, none of them could even tell him what the source of his discomfort was.
Three months ago, Yuri’s condition worsened. The discomfort had become almost unbearable, and he also started losing vision in his left eye. Earlier this month, the 50-year-old man arrived at the Kursk Regional Hospital with blurred vision, and doctors performed an MRI that revealed a long foreign body that extended from the man’s eye socket deep into his skull.
Photo: Kursk Regional Hospital
“A CT scan performed at the regional hospital showed that the foreign body was a branch that penetrated the eye socket, destroying the sinuses and damaging the base of the skull in dangerous proximity to vital brain structures,” doctors at Kursk Regional Hospital wrote in their report.
Shocked about the revelation, Yuri remembered his woodchopping accident. Luckily, doctors managed to remove the 12-cm-long foreign body through his nose without any external incisions. The operation was successful, and his vision was preserved. The patient is still under medication, but he is expected to make a full recovery.
We recently wrote about a Chinese man who lived with a metal chopstick in his throat for eight years, and another who had a knife blade embedded in his chest for the same period of time without even knowing it. So yeah, while rare, this sort of stuff isn’t exactly unheard of.
