Muscat: Abdul Qader Mohammed Hamed al Alawi had accidentally fired his gun at himself as he tried to shoot a cat that had attacked fowl at his chicken farm in Jalan Bani Bu Ali, 280 km from Muscat.
A part of the bullet remained inside the chin of the then 17-year-old, while another piece of the projectile pierced through his tongue and nose and landed in his brain.
After more than a year – December 20, to be precise – he underwent a successful surgery at a hospital in the Indian state of Kerala to get the shrapnel of the bullet removed from his brain.
“In a rare surgery, doctors at VPS Lakeshore Hospital removed parts of a bullet that had gone into the Omani boy’s brain,” the hospital confirmed.
According to Dr Sudish Karunakaran, head of neurosurgery, the surgery was conducted in two stages. In the first, doctors performed frontal craniotomy (surgical removal of part of the bone from the skull to expose the brain) in order to gain access to the brain.
The team took eight hours to complete the procedure.
The second stage saw a team of ENT, and oral and maxillofacial surgeons removing the remaining bullet parts from his chin.
The shrapnel inside the boy’s chin had been partially removed at a government hospital in Oman.
He was taken to the Indian hospital on December 18 to remove the piece inside the brain and the pellet that had remained in the chin.
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