76-Year-Old Man Has Knife Blade Removed From His Head 26 Years After He Was Stabbed

Duorijie and a photo of his X-ray | Oddity Central

What will your reaction be if you realised you have lived 26 years with a rusty knife blade in your head?

Lucky is how 76-year-old farmer Duorijie feels after he had a four-inch-long rusty knife surgically removed from his brain, 26 years after being stabbed in the head.

Duorijie who is from the rural county of Haiyan in China’s north-western Qinghai Province was stabbed in the head in 1994 during a violent mugging.

He was not only lucky to have survived the attack but also experienced nothing short of a miracle as he has been living a long knife blade stuck in his brain ever since.

The farmer had been experiencing all kinds of troublesome symptoms because of the knife blade in his brain, like lost vision in his right eye and chronic headaches.

Duorijie X-ray Scan | Oddity Central

He sought medical help in 2012 when his headaches became very severe and an X-ray of his skull led to the shocking discovery that a four-inch-long blade is stuck in his head.

Doctors rejected operating on him because they feared removing the knife blade was too dangerous.

Help came for Duorijie when doctors touring the countryside of Qinghai Province last month learned of his case and he was once again in the spotlight.

“When we found him while on a medical tour of Qinghai, we learned that experts had decided on more conservative treatment, prescribing only painkillers,” Doctor Zhang Shuxiang said. “But his symptoms began [to get] increasingly severe and unbearable. Due to the limitations of local hospitals, we decided to bring him to Shandong for the best possible treatment.”

He was flown to more than 3,000 kilometers for free treatment, seeing as he couldn’t afford to pay the medical help. Because of the blade in his brain, he had not only lost vision in his right eye, but also suffered near-full paralysis in his left arm and leg.

CT scans and X-rays performed at the hospital of Shandong First Medical University in Jinan showed that the blade was located at the base of the patient’s skull, lodged against his eye socket and pressing against his optic nerve. Removing it would be difficult, but according to chief neurosurgeon Dr Liu Guangcun, it was “the only way to resolve the pensioner’s suffering once and for all.”

Duorijie after his surgery | Oddity Central

With advancement in medicine and technology since 2012, doctors had more faith in attempting to remove the blade and on April 2 and 8 Duorijie underwent two delicate surgical procedures to finally have the long knife blade removed.

“During the two-hour surgery, surgeons removed the rusty 10-centimeter (4-inch) blade,” Dr. Zhang told reporters. “On April 8, he underwent a second operation to clean his wound. He’s recovering well and can already walk around on his own. His head pains are gone, and he has regained full sight in his right eye. He can also open his mouth and no longer coughs.”

Due to the peculiar nature of Duorijie’s case, he has been making news headlines both in China and abroad.

Speaking about his ordeal, the 76-year-old farmer said:

“I couldn’t laugh, yawn or even cough. The doctors have given me a second chance at life and ended my nightmare of more than 20 years.