Pencil In The Brain: Toddler Gets Pencil Stuck In Skull, Makes Remarkable Recovery

Forget running with scissors -- don't run with anything at all.

Wren Bowell, a two-year-old toddler near Bath, England, had a near run-in with death or severe brain damage when she ran out of her room to show her parents a drawing, tripped and lodged the pencil she had been carrying over 1.5 inches into her skull.

Surgeons at Frenchay Hospital, where Bowell was taken by her mother, a nurse,told the BBC the girl is very lucky to be alive. The pencil stopped just one millimeter short of a major blood vessel, going through her right eye socket and wedging itself over half an inch into the front lobe of her brain.

"The pencil missed her eye completely," her father, Martyn Bowell, told the Guardian.

"It was extremely close to having damaged the blood vessel but fortunately she was very lucky and it had not burst the blood vessel, so she did not have a big amount of bleeding in the brain," Ian Pople, the consultant neurosurgeon who operated on Wren, told the Huffington Post UK. Wren was operated on for four hours.

Martyn Bowell added that the pencil was "stuck so hard that they had to pull part of her face off and take out part of her skull to take out the pencil," reported the Guardian. His daughter's skull has since been put back together with biodegradable plastic plates and screws.

The accident happened in March, and the hospital released Bowell early the following month, according to the BBC.

The girl's father plans to raise money for Frenchay Hospital's children's unit through a charity bike ride with his brother-in-law, who is fundraising for the hospital's brain injury unit, according to the Huffington Post UK.