New York Cop Miraculously Skirts Death After Being Stabbed In Brain

It’s such a remarkable story that it made the front pages of not only the New York City tabloids but The New York Times today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/nyregion/new-york-officer-stabbed-in-head-is-called-luckiest-unlucky-man.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/knife-rammed-nypd-officer-eder-loor-brain-sliver-leaving-blind-voiceless-paralyzed-dead-surgeon-article-1.1063995

A Manhattan police officer was stabbed in the brain by an attacker Tuesday. Yet the cop managed to pull the knife’s three-inch blade  out of his skull, and live to tell about it. According to physicians, the knife barely missed cutting into brain areas that control vision and motor function. A major artery was “nicked,” but not fully cut, according to The Times.

The best quote about the survival of 28-year-old Eder Loor was from Dr. Joshua Bederson, the head of neurosurgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center, who spoke at a news conference.

“He is probably the luckiest unlucky man you could ever have,” Bederson said, referring to Loor, whose family includes his pregnant wife Dina and 4 1/2-year-old daughter.

The press conference on Loor’s medical status was like a anatomy lesson to the public. Bederson used a model of the brain to demonstrate exactly where the knife had cut into Loor.

Loor is trained as an EMT, so when he pulled the knife out of his own head he immediately put pressure on the wound with a towel that someone on the street had handed him, according to The Times.

When Loor was taken to Mounti Sinai, he was initially alert, the paper reported. But he became sleepy as he bled inside and outside his brain from the knife wound. That hemorrhage was growing larger, putting pressure on his brain.

Surgeons took a piece of bone out of Loor’s skull, removed a blood clot and managed to stem the bleeding of the brain.

According to The Times, the knife went through Loor’s left temporal lobe, “damaging it in an area with little function.”

And the Daily News reported that “the blade stopped just an inch from the section of the temporal lobe that controls speech, and another half inch from the area than handles motor functions.”

The prognosis for Loor is that he will initially have numbness in his face, and that he may need to take some anti-epileptic drugs, but that he should make a fully recovery, according to The Times.