Traumatic Brain Injury

Once upon a time there was a man. His name started with "H" and ended in "omer Simpson". When he was a boy he was playing with his crayons. And then he lost one after shoving it up his nose. Years later he had a strange neurological complaint and went to Dr. Hebert, who discovered the crayon on X-ray. When asked why he never noticed it before despite Homer's numerous trips to the hospital with head trauma, Dr. Hebert showed the Simpsons how he always missed it by the way he routinely held X-rays up to the light to see them.

After succesful removal of the foreign body, Homer had a dramatic recovery and even became extremely intelligent. The problem was that he had built a life that centered around him being an imbicile and he quickly began alienating all those around him. In his intellectual nirvana, he realized he would never truly be happy this way and elected to re-insert a crayon into his nose to try to regain what he had lost. And in true Simpsons fashion, all came full circle nice and neatly in 22 minutes.

The reason I make note of this now, is that a German woman has had a quite similar experience, at least to the first part of that story. When she was 4 years old, she tripped and managed to lose a pencil into her cheek. It, unlike Homer's case, was actually quickly diagnosed but went untreated due to the lack of today's sophistocated medical technology. And then at age 59 she finally had surgery to remove almost all of the pencil - 55 years later. Thanks to the skilled ENT, she has reportedly stopped having headaches and nosebleeds. The question is, in a year will she feel so isolated by her own intellectual prowess that she elects to reinsert it?