This story is too amazing not to blog.
Officer Eder Loor of the NYPD was called out on Tuesday to escort an emotionally disturbed individual to the hospital. During the process of escorting the gentleman, he became upset and attacked Officer Loor with a 3″ knife which
...sliced through the officer’s temple and into the temporal lobe and a major vein.
It passed less than half an inch from structures that control vision and speech, touched the nerves that give sensation to the face and nicked the surface of, but did not penetrate, a major artery.
Officer Loor pulled the knife out of his head and was taken to the hospital, where doctors found he was bleeding into his brain.
They found that the knife, which entered just behind the officer’s eye, went “deep into the temporal lobe and all the way down to the skull base.”
“The temporal lobe in this area does not have major function,” Dr. Bederson said. “About half an inch away, it controls speech. About a half an inch above all his motor function.”
The knife also cut through the Sylvian fissure, the deepest and most prominent of the cortical fissures of the brain, containing major blood vessels. “It cut the major vein of the Sylvian fissure,” he said, “and almost like a paper cut, it just nicked the surface of the artery but did not cut it.” The artery supplies blood for the entire left hemisphere of the brain, Dr. Bederson said.
Doctors stopped the bleeding. Officer Loor has some residual numbness in his face, which is probably due to the fact that the tip of the knife ended up pressing against his trigeminal nerve. Doctors expect the numbness to go away, and expect Officer Loor to recover fully.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2012 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Clippings, Cops, Law, Neuroscience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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