Olivia Smith was 20 months old when she fell off the sofa with a pencil in her hand.
Her mother, Susie, heard the impact and thought the pencil lead had simply broken against the armchair. She never imagined that the full 4 or 5 inches of the pencil had entered through her daughter’s right eye socket, passed through both hemispheres of her brain, and ended up lodged near her left ear.
A helicopter transported the girl, from New Boston, New Hampshire, to Boston Children’s Hospital. There, surgeons reconstructed the object’s path inside the skull and found something rarely documented: the pencil had passed within millimeters of every major blood vessel and every critical brain structure, time and again, without touching any of them. The doctors themselves described it as one of the most extraordinary trajectories they had seen in their careers. Olivia made a full recovery within months.
