Toddler Miraculously Survives Getting a Pencil Lodged in Her Brain

Two-year-old Wren Bowell has some crazy luck. The girl, who is from England, had the misfortune to trip and land so that a pencil she was carrying jammed into her eye socket and went through her skull. Yeowch! But it turned out luck was on her side after all, because while the pencil penetrated nearly four centimeters into her head, it didn’t damage her eyeball and stopped just one millimeter away from a major blood vessel. Had it pierced the vessel, she almost certainly would have had terrible brain damage or died.

Wren had been drawing in her room, when she ran to show her parents her creation. She tripped and the pencil in her hand ended up lodged into her eye socket. Her mother, a nurse, had the presence of mind not to try to remove it. Instead, Wren was taken to the hospital where she underwent a four-hour surgery that involved removing a piece of her skull to extricate the pencil. It was only later that her parents found out just how close a call their daughter had had. Her dad Martyn says,

The pencil missed her eye completely. We only found out afterwards that the pencil missed two major blood vessels and if it had gone a millimetre either way it could have been a lot worse if it had hit a third.

Fortunately, her vision is intact, her skull has been put back together with some plates and screws, and after three weeks recovery, she’s gone back home and is totally fine. Thank goodness she escaped relatively unharmed. Hopefully she won’t be put off art for good, but perhaps it’s best if she sticks to finger painting from now on.