Girl lucky to survive ‘pencil in eye’ horror
A TWO-YEAR-OLD girl escaped a potentially fatal injury after a pencil pierced her eye socket and came within a millimetre of puncturing a major blood vessel in her brain.
Wren Bowell was getting ready for bed at home when she fell over and landed on a pencil she was carrying which then penetrated her right eye socket, narrowly missing her eyeball, before lodging into the front lobe of her brain.
The little girl, from Peasedown St John, near Bath, was taken to Frenchay Hospital in Bristol where neurosurgeons operated on her for four hours, opening up her skull so that the pencil could be removed.
Ian Pople, the consultant neurosurgeon who operated on her, said she had been “extremely lucky” because other people who suffered similar injuries had died or suffered permanent brain damage.