Military docs pluck live shell from (Afghan) soldier's head

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/15/unexploded.shell.head.afghanistan/?hpt=Mid">Military docs pluck live shell from soldier's head

"I think we have a problem."

Lt. Col. Anthony Terreri, reading the CT scans of an injured soldier who'd just arrived at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, realized the shrapnel he saw lodged inside the soldier's skull wasn't really shrapnel at all. It was unexploded ordnance -- a live round of ammunition that could detonate at any time.

The young Afghani soldier had arrived less than an hour before, after an IED had flung shards of metal into his head.

"The internal part of the fragment was not solid metal, but it had a metal exterior," recalled Terreri. "There's an air gap at the end, a formed end at one side and the fragment was elongated."

He looked at a second scan, a side X-ray of the soldier's skull, to confirm his suspicions.
"The projectile was part of the bomb that went off," explained Maj. John Bini, who oversees all trauma care at Bagram. "People will pack just about anything in to these things: rocks, nails, screws, explosives."

Bini and his team immediately summoned an explosive ordnance disposal team to assess how risky it would be to conduct the surgery. The doctors needed to minimize the risk of setting off the ordnance....