- It’s a small miracle he survived for five months before going to the doctors.
You really shouldn’t try to power through persistent headaches. If your head feels like it’s splitting constantly, there might be something seriously wrong.
Take this Vietnamese man, for example.
The 35-year-old man was suffering from horrendous, persistent headaches, yet he simply tried to grit his teeth and bear the pain. After five months, however, he discovered a strange object in his nose.
At the same time, his nose and throat got extremely runny and his vision became a blur. He was rushed to a hospital, where we can only imagine the doctors’ reactions when they scanned his head.
There was a pair of chopsticks lodged inside the man’s skull.
When asked if he knew how the chopsticks got in his brain, the man couldn’t remember at first. Eventually, he recalled that a night out had turned rowdy some months back and he may have been stabbed in the face with something sharp.
We can’t help but wonder how much you have to drink not to realize you just got a pair of wooden sticks shoved into your skull.
Five Months of Pain
The bizarre medical case happened in late November, according to Vietnamese media sources. The man, identified only as Mr. PVT, had been struggling with strange health issues for some time.
Over the past five months, he had suffered from severe, recurring headaches and a sensation of tightness in his skull. He also had regular discharge through his nose and throat — sometimes snot, other times pus.
Ew.
Still, Mr. PVT had not sought medical help. He simply tried to power through the pain, until the day came when he no longer couldn’t.
One day, Mr. PVT’s nose got extremely itchy. While scratching it, he discovered what was described as a “foreign object.”
Trying to fix the issue himself, the man grabbed a pair of tweezers to try and pull out the unwelcome intruder. Much to his horror, though, he discovered that the object was a lot bigger than he’d realized.
Immediately following his attempt to dislodge the object, Mr. PVT took a turn for the worse. His headache exploded, he virtually lost his vision, and the flow of liquid from his nose became a waterfall.
At this point, his family decided it was time to see a doctor. They rushed Mr. PVT to the emergency room of the Vietnam-Cuba Friendship Hospital in Dong Hoi, where doctors promptly gave him a CT scan.
They discovered the man suffered from intracranial pneumothorax, a life-threatening condition where excess air in the skull cavity exerts pressure on the brain. Further tests revealed the obvious cause of Mr. PVT’s condition.
That would be the pair of chopsticks piercing through his nose into his brain.
A Chop in the Head
Naturally, the doctors wanted to know how the chopsticks ended up in Mr. PVT’s brain. He had no idea at first, but then his family members chimed in and the story became clear.
Some five months earlier, Mr. PVT had been out drinking when he got in a drunken fight. He remembered that he got stabbed in the face with something and was taken to receive first aid.
At the time, however, nobody found anything obviously wrong with him. We assume no one thought to check if there was something up his nose.
Mr. PVT got lucky, as both the stab in the brain and the chopsticks remaining in his head could’ve easily killed him. Fortunately, there’s a happy ending to his story.
The doctors were able to safely pull the sticks out of Mr. PVT’s skull. They then fixed the hole in his brain in a microsurgery.
According to the latest reports from the hospital, the man was in stable condition and recovering well.
Not as Bizarre as You’d Think
As outlandish as Mr. PVT’s case sounds, it’s really not all that unusual in Asia. Chopstick-related violence and resulting injuries are relatively common in Asian countries.
In a way, it makes sense. Chopsticks are hard, sharp objects that are readily available when people’s anger boils over.
For example, in 2021, doctors had to pull two pieces of plastic chopsticks out of a Taiwanese woman’s nasal cavity. She had gotten into a violent fight with her sister who stabbed her in the face with the pair of eating utensils.
The sticks got lodged in the 29-year-old woman’s sinuses. As in Mr. PVT’s case, it took a week for the doctors to realize the pieces were still in the woman’s head.
Another chopstick assault from 2016 had a sadder ending. A 51-year-old Japanese man killed his elderly father with a chopstick.
He had tried to intervene in a fight between his mother and father. During the scuffle, he accidentally jammed a chopstick he had been holding through the old man’s throat.
The next time you’re out for some Asian food, be careful of those chopsticks. They can be dangerous.