Kolkata doctors successfully remove needle from 50-year-old man's nasal cavity near brain

We had to do an angiogram to delineate the exact root where the needle was traversing from the nose to the brain. We decided to go in for skull base surgery," he said. The patient's skull had to be opened first and then the needle was pulled out from the nose, said the doctor who was part of the team which conducted the surgery. "It is important to do the craniotomy opening of the skull first, so that the needle is pulled out from the nose and we can tackle any tearing injury that can occur to the major blood vessels inside the brain," he said.

The patient recovered well after the surgery as he had only minor problems like local nasal bleeding which was managed using simple ice packs and he was discharged after three days. However, it is not clear how the needle entered his nasal cavity. "The main point to be noted in this case is that this is a foreign object and it is going through a relatively dirty area (the nose) and contaminating a very clean area, the cranial cavity (which contains the brain and all the major blood vessels)," he explained.

According to the doctor, the surgery needed to be done on a priority basis "or otherwise the infection could have spread through the needle from the nose into the brain". Doctors then sealed the tiny hole left after removing the needle from the nose to stop any leak of cerebrospinal fluid from the cranial cavity or else it could have caused the infection to spread from the nose to the brain. "The patient is doing fine but he requires long term follow-up in the form of a CT scan to rule out any brain abscess (a condition of a painful collection of pus, usually caused by a bacterial infection) and an angiogram to rule out any delayed development of aneurysm (bulge in a blood vessel)," he said.

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