Teenager oblivious to incredible injury

A BOY of 14 had no idea that a 3.5-centimetre shard of glass was wedged behind his cheekbone. 

He told staff in A and E at the Virgen del Rocio hospital in Sevilla that he experienced difficulty and pain when opening his mouth or eating. 

He explained that he had been treated at a different hospital a month earlier after he injured his face when he fainted and fell against a window. 

At the time, doctors attended to a one-centimetre wound on his cheek and drained a blood blister on his face. 

An x-ray at the Virgen del Rocio hospital revealed a faint image of 3.5-centimetre object behind his cheekbone. 

It was “relatively rare” to find a foreign object lodged there, doctors said, but a CAT scan confirmed that a foreign body “shaped like a knife-blade” was hidden behind the teenager’s cheekbone. 

He was sent to surgery where surgeons used forceps to extract the shard through the boy’s mouth. 

Following the operation, the boy could move his jaw again without difficulty and no complications or after-effects were found when he went for a checkup six months later.