Li Fuyan arrived at Yuxi Municipal Hospital in China’s Yunnan province with symptoms that seemed common: severe headaches, bad breath, and difficulty breathing.
No one knew what was causing it all. According to his own account, the explanation dated back four years, when a thief stabbed him in the lower right side of his jaw. He said that since then, he had lived with injections to ease his headaches and earaches, never imagining what he was carrying inside him.
X-rays showed a rusty knife blade about 10 centimeters long lodged behind his throat. According to a hospital executive, the blade had broken inside his head without anyone noticing. Surgeons removed it carefully to avoid breaking it.
One detail puzzled the team: when the doctors examined his mouth, they found no wounds or scars, and acknowledged that the way the blade had entered was very strange. A New York neurosurgeon who saw the images noted that it did not touch the carotid artery or any key nerves. One of the doctors called the case “a miracle”. Li’s family, surprised, had asked for a second opinion before accepting the diagnosis.
