Some construction worker in Littleton, Colorado went to the dentist and complained about a persistent toothache. Turns out, the man had been using a nail gun six days earlier and had fired a four-inch nail into his mouth without noticing. Get this. The x-ray showed that the nail had gone one and a half inches into his brain, and had just missed his right eye.

Okay, first thing. How do you not notice this? I could kind of see it if he had just injured himself somewhere else on his body, and he was in so much pain and cognitive distress that he couldn't tell a second injury had occurred in his head. Pain messes you up pretty fiercely, you know? He might even have started to fade out of consciousness when the nail gun fired. But see, there was no other injury to distract this guy from the incident at hand. Just a misfire of the nail gun that shot a nail into a nearby piece of wood and then another one into the roof of his mouth. And here's the other thing. IT WENT INTO HIS BRAIN. The brain just isn't one of those throwaway organs, like the appendix—this is the organ that regulates your body from top to bottom. But maybe that in itself is the problem. Consider this: the nail hits the brain, piercing the part that had recorded the injury. From what I can tell from the x-ray, the nail bored its merry little self into a place not too far from the hippocampus, which is the center of human memory. So that's possible, I suppose. Also, he was working on a ski resort in Colorado in January. Maybe his face was too numb to sense the impact. Then again, maybe Grady, the dead caretaker, told him to do it.

The neurosurgeon in the Denver hospital told reporters that this was the second time someone had fired a nail gun into his skull without realizing it. I'm wondering if it isn't something in the Denver water. Like lysergic acid diethylamide, for instance.

Here's how I imagine the scene when the hospital nurse took this guy's history:

Nurse: You didn't notice anything unusual at the time the accident occurred?

Nail Head: No. Like I said, I just remember the misfire into the beam. Then the toothache a few days later. I kept eating ice cream to numb the pain.

Nurse: Were you drinking heavily at the time of the accident, sir?

Nail Head: Of course not.

Nurse: Are you perhaps a cyborg sent from the future to wreak havoc and kill the woman who is going to give birth to a son who will defeat your massive robot armies?

I don't mean to make light of this. Really I don't. It's just that I'm pretty sure I'd notice something like a four-inch long foreign object discharging into my brain.

Tags: safety