A 64 -year -old Italian has survived after spending two days with an arrow stuck in the head before being conscious in an Ancona hospital (in the center of the country) where it has been operated and remains serious, as reported by the local press on Tuesday,
According to a first reconstruction, the man survived two days at home with an arrow housed in the head, which had shot his own crossbow, is unknown if by mistake or in an attempt at suicide.
The doctor Maurizio Iacoangeli, head of Neurosurgery of the Torrette Hospital of Ancona, explained that “the patient had arrived aware, with his eyes open. He was unconherently blown, but he spoke. He had been drinking or drinking two days without eating or drinking, only at home. The arrow prevented him from turning his head”, in statements to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
“If the arrow follows the right path. If you avoid the noble areas of the brain, the so -called eloquent structures, the Perallosa artery, the upper sagittal sinus, the major venous vessels, then it can happen. A millimeter beyond, and the patient would have died instantly. He was lucky,” the doctor added.
In addition, the arrow material, carbon, has allowed a good performance of computerized tomography and has been better planned. “Because it is not so much about extracting it, but about extracting it without causing massive bleeding. The arrow acts like a cap. If you extract it, you run the risk of the hole opening,” he said.
Now it should be expected “that the patient survives, because he has spent two days without eating or drinking and an infection could develop,” he said and has advanced that “today there is much talk about brain plasticity, that is, that a part of the brain compensates for lost functions in other parts. I firmly believe in it.”
