A teen boy went to bed one evening and awoke the next morning with a massively swollen and painful hand. He sought immediate medical attention which revealed a startling find of a very obscure foreign object inside his hand, lodged between his fingers, causing his sudden discomfort.
The unnamed 19-year-old patient in England said he had been hitting rounds on a punching bag, when his brother’s face got the in the way and he hit him in the mouth, instead of the sack he meant to sock. His fist immediately began to hurt, as expected, but probably not as much as his brother’s mouth that was on the receiving end of it, but nobody knew the extent of the accidental victim’s injuries since he allegedly left right after the hit, the Daily Mail reported.
The brother with the hurt hand didn’t think much of it, simply washed off a cut he got from it, and went to bed. It was the next morning when he woke to find the last laugh was had by the man with the hurt mouth, unbeknownst to him.
After arriving at the hospital, a doctor initially diagnosed him with an infected human bite wound, which is as nasty as you can imagine. The teen’s fingers had become so swollen he could barely move them. That diagnosis changed once physicians found his brother had left behind a massive tooth in the boy’s hand, specifically a lateral incisor, as a parting gift of sorts lodged between the teen’s joints.
WARNING: Graphic images show beyond a simple flesh wound.
The tooth came with a side gift of a bacterial infection, because let’s face it, some people’s mouths aren’t the cleanest places on the planet. The lodged tooth and subsequent infection had caused some permanent damage, in the form of some of the tissue and surrounding muscle having died. The tendons to his pinky were also frayed but mostly intact.
Surgeons meticulously removed the misplaced tooth and the teen was released from medical care after two days of treatment.
This case was one for the books and Dr. Roshan Vijayan, a plastic surgeon at Queen Victoria Hospital in West Sussex wrote it, described the strange injury in the BMJ Case Reports.
“This case was unusual in that an entire tooth was implanted into the patient’s hand and, remarkably, without his apparent knowledge,” Vijayan wrote. He added that honesty is by far the best policy when it comes to injuries involving human teeth, so treatment can be most effective to remedy it. Without knowing all the details, serious infection could occur because wounds could be contaminated with human saliva.
“Such an approach sticks to the facts of the mechanism of injury, without implying blame or collusion with a criminal investigation,” the doctor wrote.
Vijayan then validated many of our suspicions with the hand victim’s story seeming inconsistent at best. The doctor noted that considering the tooth that had become stuck and the angle in which it was embedded, it’s more likely that it was caused by an uppercut punch to the brother’s face, and not an accidental slip of the punching bag.
Hopefully this is a lesson the brawling brothers won’t forget anytime soon — as long as they want to keep their teeth and their hand health.