OUCH!

British Army medics helped save the life of an Afghan boy who was stabbed in the head with a knife. Doctors at the British military field hospital at Camp Bastion, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, successfully operated to remove the three-inch blade. The 10-year-old boy was stabbed when he tried to protect his father during a row with a male customer in his shop in Kandahar.

The customer lunged for the boy's father and stabbed the boy. The knife went behind his eye and penetrated the front of his brain. The boy's father took him to a military base in Kandahar and pleaded with doctors to save him. Medics there used a portable digital X-ray machine, which produced an image in two minutes, before flying him to Camp Bastion for the operation at a tented field hospital. The boy, who has not been named, amazed medics by walking into the field hospital with the knife embedded in his head on July 14 last year. Surgeons of 212 Field Hospital operated the same night, before handing over to 208 Field Hospital, who administered the aftercare. Major Stephen Gallacher, 49, senior A&E nurse of 208 Field Hospital, said: "It was a horrendous sight. I just didn't think he would survive. "But he was soon off the life-support machine and was up and about within days. It was just amazing." Major Gallacher, a father-of-four from Caernarfon, North Wales, added: "We knew how the knife was sitting because we had the X-ray. "The knife had come in at an angle and gone down behind his eye and had penetrated the front of his brain. "To have simply pulled the knife out would have been a disaster because you wouldn't have known what damage was behind it."