Getting to the point: After 55 years, woman has a pencil removed from her skull

by Thor on Aug. 07th, 2007
in Human Organism

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Headache: After 55 years of it being embedded in her head, a German woman last week finally had most of a pencil removed from her brain and skull cavity. (Flickr photo by josquin2000)For the past 55 years, you could say that Margaret Wegner’s brain was pretty sharp. That all ended last week, however, when a three-inch pencil was surgically removed from her head.

Back when she was four years old, the German woman fell on while carrying a pencil (remember all those warnings your teacher gave you?) and it lodged in her head, going through her cheek and into her brain. At the time, there was no safe way to remove the pencil, so she went on living with it in her head. It had gone in so thoroughly into her skull, it actually was sunken beneath her skin.

To say the least, it caused complications in her daily living. Wegner suffered chronic headaches and nosebleeds. She also had lost most of her sense of smell.

A Berlin doctor was able to use new technology to find the pencil in her head and determine a way to extract it. That procedure was done on Friday, with most of the pencil being removed. Some fragments were left behind.

My own editorial comment: There’s no evidence that the other end of the pencil erased any of her memory.