Pencil in boy's heart 'a time bomb'
12-year-old recovers after heart pierced in accident
from the National Post, March 8, 2000

Helena, Mont. - A 12-year-old boy whose heart was pierced by a pencil as he lunged toward his bed to catch a football is recuperating after 2.5 harrowing hours of the pencil throbbing at every beat in his chest.  

"I kind of felt it go in, but it didn't hurt," Nathan King said from his home in Helena.  "So I looked downs.  Then I started yelling for Mom.  I was yelling, 'Mom, Mom, Mom, I'm gonna die.'"

Crying and struggling to breathe, Nathan stumbled into the kitchen with the eraser end protruding two to three inches from his chest.  He collapsed in front of his mother, Lorri Earley, with the pencil throbbing like a metronome.  It was Nathan's birthday, February 23.

Ms. Earley, a nurse, called 911 and held her son to keep him from pulling at the pencil.  He was rushed to St. Peter's Community Hospital in Helena, then flown to Benefis Healthcare in Great Falls, Idaho, for open-heart surgery.

The pencil had penetrated the right chamber of his heart, ripped a valve and was embedded in the septum, near the back wall of the heart.  It was a time bomb," said Dr. Brett Williams.  "If blood had started leaking into the sac around the heart, this could have had a completely different outcome."

Had anyone removed the pencil during the 2.5 hours before he reached Benefis, he would have died within minutes, Dr. Williams said.

But because it was stuck firmly in place, blood did not leak from the hole even through the pencil was vibrating with every beat.  It was not until two hours after the accident that surgeons finally opened Nathan's chest.  They hooked him up to a heart-lung machine to keep his blood pumping while they inspected the damage, before removing the pencil and sewing up the tears.

Nathan was able to go home last week, but he will miss school for awhile.  Sports are out of the questions for about six months, but the boy says he feels OK.

To welcome him home, neighbors gave him a sweatshirt that shows a heart pierced by a wooden pencil with the words, "Tougher than Dracula."