Tue 18 June 2019:
A teen who survived after a 10-inch knife became lodged in his face missing his brain by millimetres admits “it could have been the end of me”. Jimmy Russell said her son Eli Gregg was playing outside their family home, south of Kansas City, when she heard a chilling scream. The 15-year-old then staggered into her kitchen with the huge blade jutting out from just beneath his eye and she immediately called 911.
“It looked pretty grim, it was scary,” the mum said in a video released by the University of Kansas Health System. The knife – which Eli had found on the ground – was embedded in his skull and its tip reached to just under his brain. The point was pushing up against his carotid artery, which supplies the brain with blood. “When she (his mum) looked at me, she just gasped,” Eli said. “It could have been the end of me.”
MILLIMETRES FROM DEATH
Doctors say the teenager was just millimetres from almost certain death. “It (the knife) didn’t belong to the family. They found it, it sounds like, outside in the grass,” said Dr Koji Ebersole, who oversaw the operation to remove it. “Eli wanted to take it away from the younger kids for protection, and…there was a trip and a fall, and it was in the hand of another boy at the time, and it fell into his face. “It could not have had a pound more force on it and him survive that event. I don’t think he would have survived it.” A team of surgeons put together an intricate plan to remove the blade on Friday morning. They were prepared for possible bleeding into the brain, but the operation went without a hitch and the artery remained intact.
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