The 5-centimeter nail shown in this X-ray was found after a man came to a Seoul, South Korea, hospital complaining of a severe headache. After examining and interviewing the man, doctors speculated that the nail had been the result of an accident four years before his visit, but that the man did not know the nail was lodged in his head.
This X-ray reveals a cell phone lodged in a Salvadoran prisoner's lower intestine. According to news reports, the man is one of four prisoners who are members of the Mara Salvatrucha street gang. The men were caught with cell phones, spare chips and a charger that they had attempted to smuggle, according to authorities at San Salvador's Zacatecoluca prison.
Surgery was needed to save Houdini, a 12-foot Burmese python in Ketchum, Idaho, that swallowed an entire electric blanket with the electrical cord and control box. The X-ray here shows the blanket's tangled wiring and mechanism within the python's intestine.
This photo of an X-ray provided by Imperial Point Animal Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., shows a 13-inch serrated knife that somehow was swallowed by Elsie, a 6-month-old Saint Bernard puppy. The dog had the blade between her esophagus and stomach for about four days before it was removed in a two-hour operation. The puppy has an 8-inch scar but recovered quickly and was returned to her family.
A keeper at the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary on Australia's Gold Coast holds a carpet python snake. The 32-inch snake swallowed four golf balls it likely mistook for eggs, according to local reports. Surgery was needed to remove the balls from the snake's intestine.
This X-ray reveals the Australian kitten, known as Kohl, inside the gut of a 6-foot-long carpet python. Though the kitten's skull was larger than the snake's girth, the reptile dislocated its jaw to swallow the feline whole.
This 2.5lb and 17 cm in diameter kidney stone was removed from a patient in Hungary, world's largest.
Eleven-year-old Chinese schoolboy Liu Cheong had a brush with death when his friend shot him in the head with a 16-inch arrow, according to numerous international media reports. The arrow entered his skull through the eye socket and lodged in the back of his head. Somehow, the boy was spared a fatal brain injury.
This X-ray shows how, during a fall, a car key penetrated the eyelid of 17-month-old Nicholas Holderman of Kentucky, reaching his brain. While doctors initially believed that the object had ruptured Nicholas' eyeball, another team of specialists later confirmed that the boy had sustained no permanent damage.
X-ray images show how a teenage boy cheated death when a 5-inch knife was plunged into his head. The 16-year-old and two other young men were injured when they tried to stop a friend getting robbed at a bus stop. The teenager was rushed to hospital with the kitchen knife still stuck in his forehead after the attack in Walworth, south London, in September 2008.
This X-ray was taken of a 60-year-old man who checked himself into Nishtar Hospital in Multan, Pakistan. He sought treatment because he claimed thieves had inserted a Pepsi bottle into his anus before stealing two of his buffalo.
A dentist found the source of the toothache Patrick Lawler was complaining about on the roof of his mouth: a four-inch (10-centimeter) nail the construction worker had unknowingly embedded in his skull six days earlier.
octors in Pakistan removed a whole lightbulb from this prisoner's anus. The man said he awoke with the problem, but doctors weren't so sure.
8-year-old Haley Lents of Indiana swallowed 10 magnets and 20 steel balls from a Magnetix toy set. The magnets and balls attracted one another within her digestive tract, ripping a total of eight holes in her intestines and forcing her parents to rush her to the hospital for emergency surgery. Lents later told reporters that the magnets and steel balls "looked like candy."
These amazing X-rays show how a man arrived with a tap and 16 inches of pipework stuck in his eye at a hospital's casualty unit. But the terrified patient was forced to pull the tap out himself - because surgeons took three hours to send for a plumber to get it out. Yi Zhao, 57, had slipped in the bath impaling his left eye on the tap at his home.
