Do you have a pencil in your head right now? Probably not, right? Oh right, you have no way of knowing. The AP reports that doctors from Aachen University Hospital in Germany have just announced the successful removal of a four-inch pencil from the head of an Afghan man who spent 15 years blithely unaware that there was a pencil fully inside of him. (The extraction was performed in 2011, but the details of the case were just made public at a medical conference.)

After over a decade of suffering from headaches, frequent colds, and the terrifying realization that he was growing steadily blind in one eye, the man finally decided to swing by the hospital to see what was up. Like, am I sick? Do I have a pencil in my head?

Turns out he had a pencil in his head.

According to the AP, the pencil "was lodged from his sinus to his pharynx." It had injured his right eye socket and was also just a fucking pencil lodged in his head, which is crazy.

The man said he did not know how the pencil came to be inside his head, just like how you don't remember every little thing that happened in your day. He DID remember taking a bad fall as a child, and I guess we're meant to extrapolate from that that, at the age of 9, he fell while playing, impaled himself on a pencil, and then immediately forgot about it. That seems unlikely. Is it possible the pencil existed first and that he, a human child, merely grew all around it?

In any case, the story has a happy ending because the man has since recovered.

And now you have been alerted to the fact that there is possibly a pencil inside your head.

[Image via Shutterstock]

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