UTMC

YELLOWKNIFE, NORTHWEST TERRITORIES (AP) - A Canadian man was just scratching what he thought was an old itch this week when it turned out to be a knife blade that had been buried in his back for almost three years.

Billy McNeely said this week it all goes back to an April, 2010, birthday party in McNeely's home town of Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories. McNeely got into a fight over an arm-wrestling contest and was stabbed five times. A doctor stitched him up back then and never took X-Rays.

"They never took no X-rays, they just stitched me up, bandaged me up," McNeely told CBC News.

Billy McNeely was just scratching what he thought was an annoying old itch earlier this week when it turned out to be a knife blade that had been buried in his flesh for almost three years. (AP Photo/THE CANADIAN PRESS, Billy McNeely)

Ever since, McNeely would set off metal detector and he's had a lump in his back where the knife went in. It never stopped nagging him and grew more painful this week.

"My nail caught a piece of the tip of the blade that was underneath the skin and made a little sound, so that worried me," he said.

Doctors removed the kitchen knife blade measuring about 2.7 inches (7 centimeters) out of his back. Read more via KSL News...

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... a seven centimeter blade?
...
I could almost understand it if it was only a little top, but the whole darn blade??

I wouldn't call that guy stupid, he did seek medical attention. After a bar fight which occurred during a birthday party, you'd hardly expect anyone to be in the mental condition to insist on x-rays. Afterwards, it would have been only reasonable for him to assume that "If there was anything wrong, they'd have noticed it." I know I've got enough titanium alloy in me to keep a small aerospace contractor supplied for a week, and even the stuff that's fairly close to the surface in my right arm only presents to me as a little bump. I'd never guess it's a self-tapping Phillips-head screw. That thing is a heck of a lot better, but depending on where it sits and how, and how insensitive that guy is to begin with, it's probably not something to notice much. Having got stabbed five times, he probably attributed that bump to that and was generally too much of a tough guy to bother going to the doctor about it. It's not inconceivable it only wandered to the surface more recently.
Setting off metal detectors is hardly something to get excited about these days, either. Heck, I've personally set of metal detectors for no apparent reason, after emptying my pockets, and before I got my new shiny bits. And even with the wand, they found nothing. If it was something that always happened whenever I stepped through one, and if I stepped through one often enough to actually notice the pattern, I would have perhaps have gotten curious enough to check myself over with my stud finder. But then again, I know roughly how these metal detectors work and generally am interested in such things.
So I'd err on the side of tough with this guy. Which isn't to say he isn't stupid, also, but the right chain of circumstances, and he wouldn't need to be particularly stupid for this chain of events to develop as it did. It doesn't mark him out as a rapier-witted master of cunning or anything. But while some people indeed are so preoccupied with mundane, day-to-day affairs, that like absent minded professors preoccupied with highly abstract affairs, they fail to notice and pay due attention to oddities in their surroundings or themselves, the genuinely stupid, I wouldn't see such traits as being in evidence just from this short article. They aren't ruled out, though.

That doctor who stitched him up, though...he's never gonna hear the end of it. In future, whenever he's examining an x-ray, his colleagues will approach him, "Oh, yes, it's one of these new x-ray thingies, marvellous how you can see all the stuff inside, isn't it?"
At medical conferences, from the breakfast buffet to the dinner table, he'll have pointed out to him where he can find the knifes and what they're for.

must have been quite a birthday party.

We Kanucks are a hardy, drunk lot.