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A 30-year-old man walked into the emergency department after a suicide attempt by firing a nail from a pneumatic nail gun directed at his left temple. He was haemodynamically stable and neurologically intact, able to recall all events and moving all extremities with a Glascow Coma Scale of 15. CT of the brain showed a 6.3 cm nail in the right frontal region without major intracerebral vessel disruption. He was taken to the operating room for left temporal wound washout, debridement of gross contamination and closure with titanium cranial fixation plate. The foreign body was not accessible on initial surgical intervention and was left in place to define anatomy and plan for subsequent removal. Thin slice CT images were used to create 3D reconstructions to facilitate stereotactic navigation and foreign body removal via right craniotomy the following day. The patient tolerated the procedures well and recovered with full neurological function.

With the advent of proton pump inhibitors and H. Pylori treatment, the old dogma “the most common cause of lower GI bleeding is upper GI bleeding” may no longer be valid. We sought to determine the most common causes of GI bleeding in patients without an obvious source and their clinical outcomes. We queried our hospital database for GI hemorrhage during 2015, excluding patients with obvious sources such as hematemesis or anal pathology. We collected data from patients with GI bleeding defined as bright red blood per rectum, melena, or a positive fecal occult blood test. The primary endpoints were etiology of GI bleed, amount of transfusions required, and types of interventions performed. Ninety-three patients were admitted with GI bleeding as defined previously: mean age was 74 years and mean hemoglobin was 8.2. Seventy-four per cent received blood transfusions with an average of 2 units transfused per patient; 22 per cent received 3 or more units of blood. The etiology of bleeding was 17 per cent upper GI source, 15 per cent lower GI source, and in 68 per cent, the source remained unknown. Bleeding stopped spontaneously in 86 per cent of patients and 9 per cent died. Endoscopy was performed in 71 per cent, but only 6 per cent underwent therapeutic endoscopic intervention. No patient had surgical or interventional radiologic procedures related to their GI bleed. Gastrointestinal bleeding, without an obvious source on presentation, rarely requires operative intervention or interventional radiologic procedure. Blood transfusions were not predictive of the need for therapeutic endoscopic intervention which was required in only 6 per cent of patients.

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