"It's something you don't see every day, a patient who arrives awake and speaking with a 3-foot-spear in his head."

A 16-year-old boy survives a fishing accident.

When the teen arrived at the hospital...

The same hospital that houses Ronald Poppo, the man whose face was partially eaten off last month.

... medical staff used rebar cutters and vise grips from the Miami-Dade fire department to cut the shaft protruding from the boy's head so that they could fit him inside a CT scan machine....

It was a stroke of luck for [Yasser] Lopez that no one panicked and attempted to remove the spear before the teen got into surgery, since doing so could have damaged his brain, Bullock added.

"The amazing thing is that the boy is able to speak a little now," Bullock told reporters. "He's saying short sentences, he's out of bed, he's able to make his needs felt."

The teen has no memory of the accident and may never regain those memories, the doctor said.

Scary X-ray at the link.  It calls to mind the famous 19th century character Phineas Gage, who survived a iron rod blown through his head. Notably, Gage experienced a dramatic personality change:

"It's reported that he became what now would be classically described as 'disinhibited' - this is a classic term for what happens to some people after damage to their frontal lobes," says John Aggleton, professor of neuroscience at Cardiff University. "So, he loses his inhibitions, both in a social and emotional context.... Difficult company, to put it mildly."

For specialists, this was a staggering revelation. For the first time, this was evidence that damage to the brain could affect our behaviour and personality....

"It alerted people to the fact that a part of the brain - the frontal lobes - that we associate with sort of planning and intellectual strategies also had this important role in emotion," says Professor Aggleton. "That raised the question how on earth are emotion and intellect linked together?"

The path of the spear through Lopez's brain is different from the rod in Gage's. I'm not attempting to speculate about what effect this new injury might have. Best wishes to young Lopez.