Weird news: Man With Knife In Skull For Hours 'Wasn't Aware Of It'

Sunday 4 January 2015

Man With Knife In Skull For Hours 'Wasn't Aware Of It'

When a Brazilian taxi driver got into a bar brawl, he didn't know when the fight actually came to a head -- his head.

Juacelo Nunes de Oliveira, 39, was stabbed during an argument, and it took more than three hours before he realized there was a blade running through his skull to his jaw bone, CNN reports.

Oliveira was at a party in Agua Branca last Sunday when he was stabbed four times; three times in the torso -- one of which perforated a lung -- and once in the head. He was driven to a nearby hospital and transferred to an emergency facility in Teresina, 62 miles away.

"He had the knife lodged in his head for this whole period but he was not aware of it," Dr. Gilberto Albuquerque told CNN. "We believe the shock and a bit of the drinking may have helped him not to understand the knife was still in his head."

X-ray photos released by the military to CNN and Globo show the knife protruding from behind his left eye. Albuquerque said the knife stopped only when it struck the victim's lower jaw.

Doctors told 9News that Oliveira is lucky to be alive.

Brazilian man stabbed in the head survives despite knife lodged in his skull for over 3 hours: http://t.co/nPtR7AWAAj pic.twitter.com/YvLPqcKANI
— CNN International (@cnni) January 4, 2015

The surgery took two and a half hours, and Oliveira reportedly walked out of the hospital five days later.

"The knife crossed his head just behind the optical nerve, got very close to the olfactory nerve and (was) just a fraction from the gustatory nerve," Albuquerque told 9News. "He could have been blinded and could have lost his senses of smell and taste, but none of that happened and he is alive and healthy."

Oliveira's attackers are still at large.