According to statements from the hospital, doctors Josep Rubio, pediatric maxillofacial surgeon, and José Hinojosa, pediatric neurosurgeon, performed this unprecedented medical procedure in May 2023, managing to remove the dentist’s anesthetic needle that had migrated to the little girl’s brain.
Despite the risk, the intervention was successful and the girl managed to recover without brain damage or neurological sequelae. According to what the girl’s mother said, she took her daughter to a dentist in Barcelona to have a cavity treated. However, the needle from her anesthesia stayed stuck in her and reached her nervous system.
An unprecedented surgical intervention
The mother also commented that, at first, they observed that the syringe was removed from the girl’s mouth but without the needle, which alerted the parents. Therefore, several dentists tried to extract the needle but the more they touched it, the more it sank, until one of them contacted Dr. Josep Rubio, the head of maxillofacial surgery at the Sant Joan de Déu Hospital, to ask for advice.
Rubio recommended that the girl be taken to the hospital, where she was admitted and as soon as she returned, she underwent successful surgery. According to the little girl’s relatives, the intervention was much longer than expected because the needle had slipped through one of the small holes through which nerves and arteries pass.
Specialists made an incision on the right side of the head to remove the needle. The girl was hospitalized for a week, with a good evolution, and the surgeons considered that she had no sequelae, except for the scar.
Last February, this case was presented at the Congress of the Spanish Society of Scientific Neurosurgery, which was held in Baeza (Jaén), so the doctors plan to publish it in a scientific journal in the future.
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