Man shoots nail into brain without noticing

A suburban Chicago man accidentally shot a 3.25in (8.25cm) nail into his skull but is recovering after doctors successfully removed it from the centre of his brain. But he had no idea the nail had entered his brain until the next day, when he began feeling nauseous.

Mr Autullo, who lives in Orland Park, said that he was building a shed on Tuesday and was using the nail gun above his head when he fired it. With nothing to indicate that a nail hadn’t simply whizzed by his head, his long-time companion, Gail Glaenzer, cleaned the wound with peroxide.

He was unaware a nail had been fired into his brain until he began feeling sick the next day and his fiancée convinced him to go to hospital.

Doctors at Advocate Christ Medical Centre in Oak Lawn, Illinois, who successfully removed the nail, told Autullo that it had come within millimetres of the area used for motor function.

Mr Autullo thought that the nail gun had simply hit his forehead, but realised later that when the gun came in contact with his head, the sensor recognised a flat surface and fired. While there are pain-sensitive nerves on a person's skull, there are none within the brain itself.

Chicago man Dante Autullo was recovering after having a nail removed from his brain – which he hadn’t known was there. Dante Autullo thought his doctors were joking, and that he had merely cut himself with a nail gun while building a shed. But they assured him that the X-ray was real: a nail was lodged in the middle of his brain.

Hospital spokesman Mike Maggio said the part of the skull that was removed for surgery had to be replaced with a titanium mesh amid worries that it might have been contaminated by the nail. The surgery took two hour.

Dr Schaffer said that the man’s skull stopped the nail going farther into his brain. He said he removed the nail by putting two holes in Mr Autullo’s skull, on either side of the nail, then pulled the nail out along with a piece of the skull.

His fiancee, Gail Glaenzer, told on Friday that he was in good spirits after the two-hour surgery.

 A similar incident occured in 2010 in California, when builder Victor Benavidez had an 8cm nail lodged just 1mm from his brain after the gun discharged when he was fixing a roof.