30 Unbelievable X-Rays
I don’t have a lot to add to most of these photos, because they’re crazy enough to speak for themselves. But by way of introduction, you should know that most of them are pretty graphic and include links to news stories and other photos that might put you off your lunch. If nothing else, though, you’ll learn to be careful around arrows, keys, bullets, and just about everything in your house that isn’t your bed.
1. An 11-year-old boy was shot through the eye with an arrow. It was only stopped by the back of his skull.
2. Billiards. Rainy night. Enough said.
3. A woman in the Netherlands swallowed 78 pieces of cutlery.
4. The worst drinking problem I’ve ever seen.
5. A dog swallowed a rubber duck after using it as a chew toy and fighting with another dog over it.
6. A 12-foot Burmese python got a little too hungry and ingested an electric blanket, complete with cord and control box.
7. Thank goodness the guy didn’t use his body for this one: A smuggler traveling from Sydney to Bangkok was caught trying to sneak 44 snakes and lizards out of Australia.
8. A Florida man was stabbed in the head by an unknown assailant in 2007, resulting in a gruesome image that doesn’t even look real. But Michael Hill survived the ordeal, and is currently the Guiness World Record holder in the category “Largest Object Removed From Human Skull.”
9. Toddler Nicholas Holderman suffered a horrible accident when he fell on a set of car keys. Despite puncturing his brain, he was able to receive surgery and make a full recovery.
10. A construction worker in Los Angeles fell from a roof while using a nail gun, sending several metal bolts directly into his skull.
11. An Indiana girl swallowed a bunch of toy magnets and steel balls, which needed to be surgically removed.
12. This image came from a Saint Bernard that accidentally swallowed a knife. Though no doubt a painful experience, the pooch pulled through and survived just fine with surgery.
13. Prison guard Louis Pepe was stabbed with a comb by an imprisoned al-Qaida operative in 2000, a wound that left him with limited mobility and speech.
14. Pat Skinner was left with a pair of surgical scissors still inside her after a procedure to remove her colon.
15. This is Lance Armstong’s collarbone, which he broke in 2009 and was subsequently repaired through the copious use of screws.
16. A man diving and fishing off the Brazilian coast fired a spear that ricocheted and landed in his own head. It took five hours of surgery for doctors to extract the bolt.
17. An elderly Colorado man coughed up a nail that doctors estimated had been in his sinus cavity for 30 years. How he never knew about it is a whole other mystery.
18. A man in China was unwisely using a small pair of scissors as an after-meal toothpick when he laughed at a friend’s joke and wound up swallowing the tiny blades.
19. Attacked outside a Melbourne night club, this young man wound up with a chair leg embedded in his eye and neck.
20. A retired Kansas man sustained an accidental injury when a friend shot a nail into his head during a home construction project.
21. Chinese woman Luo Cuifen wound up with 23 needles in her body, likely placed there when she was infant by grandparents hoping to kill the child and let a boy take her place.
22. A New Zealand man got into a brawl that left him with a knife blade stuck in his brain. Thankfully, surgeons were able to remove the metal and save the man’s life.
23. This image shocked even me: California construction worker Ron Hunt took a tumble and landed on the drill he was using, sending the 18-inch drillbit completely through his skull. Miraculously, the bit didn’t impale his brain, merely “nudged” it, limiting the nerve damage.
24. Firefighter Matt Long’s injuries looked bad: He was crushed by a Bear Stearns charter bus that made an illegal right turn in December 2005. He wasn’t even expected to walk again. But in 2008, he ran the New York City Marathon.
25. Construction injuries are common fodder for outlandish X-rays, including this one of worker Jed Durant, injured by a stray nail.
26. A teenage boy in London was attacked during an attempted mugging and stabbed with a knife that plunged several inches into his head. He was able to survive, and the attacker was arrested and convicted of attempted murder.
27. A young man in Colorado was struck in the head by a metal pin from a garden tiller. Surprisingly, a trip to the ER didn’t show the pin, and it went undetected for the first 48 hours after the accident.
28. Patrick Lawler thought he had a toothache, but the truth was much worse: He’d been hit with a ricochet nail from a gun that had shot through his mouth and into his skull with such force and speed he hadn’t even noticed.
29. Romanticism went awry when a New Mexico man hid a diamond engagement ring in his girlfriend’s milkshake and she swallowed it without knowing. It took some extra helpings of fiber to get the ring back, which the couple then (hopefully) cleaned thoroughly before going through with the proposal.
30. A German woman lived most of her life with a section of pencil stuck in her head, finally getting it surgically removed after 55 years.
