1/3. Unusual craniocerebral injury caused by a pneumatic nail gun.A man was found unconscious near a ladder in a house. After resuscitation he was brought to a hospital and x-rays of the skull showed that two 12-cm long nails had completely penetrated the cranial cavity. The nails were operatively removed and after treatment for 5 weeks, the patient was transferred to a rehabilitation centre with a decreasing hemiparesis on the left side and general deterioration and then, after an attempted suicide to a psychiatric hospital. The perforating cranio-cerebral injury from a pneumatic nail gun known to reach only low muzzle velocities is a very unusual finding.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = near (Clic here for more details about this article) |
2/3. suicide with two guns represents a special type of combined suicide.suicide by simultaneous gunshots with two firearms is rare. The case of a 90-year-old man who killed himself with two 6.35 mm pistols fired at the temples at the same time is presented. The victim was found dead on the terrace of his home; two guns and two cartridges were present near the corpse. Cases of suicides with two guns published in the literature are compared, and the Italian cases are illustrated briefly. The authors describe the circumstances and autopsy findings that permitted the assertion that it was a case of suicide and to exclude an homicide and show, by figures, the three-dimensional reconstruction of cranial shooting injuries. The use of two guns is considered a representation of a special type of "combined suicide" or "planned complex suicide."- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = near (Clic here for more details about this article) |
3/3. Penetrating craniofacial injuries in children with wooden and metal chopsticks.Penetrating craniofacial injuries with chopsticks in children are peculiar accidents in the Oriental culture. All 10 cases previously reported were caused by wooden chopsticks that required surgical operations. However, there are no reported injuries with metal chopsticks in the past literature which should have been as common as that of wooden chopstick injuries in asia. We evaluated the difference of injury patterns and clinical observations between wooden and metal chopstick injuries. We reviewed 6 treated children with penetrating craniofacial injuries from chopsticks: one wooden and five metal chopsticks. One child who had penetration through the nasal cavity presented with temporary rhinorrhea, another with mild hemiparesis, and one child with temporary upward gaze limitation of the left eye. Radiological examination revealed 1 patient with epidural hemorrhage, 1 patient with minimal subdural hemorrhage, and 4 with intracerebral hemorrhage that were fortunately too small to receive surgery. We performed surgical procedure only for a child who had a wooden chopstick that had impacted into the temporal cortex. We followed up all 6 children for more than 1 year, and found that all had fully recovered to near-normal neurological status. We observed that penetrating craniofacial injuries with metal chopsticks rarely require surgical intervention and usually results in good outcome because the resultant wound is usually small without broken fragments compared to injuries with wooden chopsticks.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = near (Clic here for more details about this article) |