It’s a miracle that came just in time for Easter for the Mothibi family.

Keneilwe Mothibi’s 23-year-old brother Tshepiso shocked Mahikeng doctors when he arrived with a sharp self-made shank knife lodged between the narrow space of his nose and left eye.

He had been involved in a fight at a tavern in Magogoe near Mahikeng earlier this month and the stab wound cut was so deep the knife was embedded at the base of his brain.

He was airlifted from Mahikeng provincial hospital to Tshepong Hospital in Klerksdorp for a gruelling seven-hour surgery; it took two hours just to prepare to slowly remove the knife.

“We are so happy that he came out fine from the surgery and wasn’t permanently damaged … We are very thankful to the doctors, they really did the best they could,” Keneilwe told City Press this week.

Head of the hospital’s neurosurgery unit Dr Tharun Krishna said Tshepiso’s case had been one of the most challenging that he had come across in his career – and he said he had seen many.

He and his team – including, Dr Masedi Mohale, the neurosurgery registrar‚ Dr Ben Hameda and Dr Hilda Mazvhikwa‚ both anaesthetists‚ and Sister Nontsikelelo Mpana‚ the theatre nurse – performed a craniotomy on Tshepiso to remove the blade.

“We usually receive consultation requests from hospitals all over the North West. Staff at the Mahikeng hospital sent a scanned picture of the patient to us and we immediately told them to bring the patient to us. They did a very good job securing the weapon with bandages so that it did not move around on the trip here because that could have caused more damage,” Krishna said.

“Looking at the scan, our concern was that the blade was passing through critical areas of the brain and went through to the base of the skull. But looking at the scan, we couldn’t see if it was going through any critical vessels or not.”

Krishna and his team performed a cerebral angiogram to get a picture of the vessels – but because of the size of the metal, it distorted the images.

“So we took him in for a craniotomy – meaning we cut a window into the skull to create a surgical corridor into the brain. We found that all the important nerves and vessels had fortunately been missed by the knife,” he said.

Then the really hard part started. Krishna said removing the knife took some doing.

“You can’t just wriggle the knife out because it could cut into the arteries. So we disengaged it bit by bit,” he said.

After surgery Mothibi was in ICU for a few days. Neurological assessments done on him came back normal and his eyesight in both eyes was not affected. He was discharged at the weekend and reunited with his family.

Fortunately for him, he will not need any rehabilitation because there was no permanent damage to his brain or eyesight.

“We do offer patients with this kind of severe trauma psychological counselling because they might suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Images of Tshepiso’s face with the full blade still lodged in his brain taken when he was in theatre went viral on social media this week, much to the shock and dismay of the family.

Keneilwe was particularly scathing of the hospital’s decision to release the images – despite having obtained permission from her brother.

“The images are very shocking … it’s disturbing. We really didn’t like that as a family because we weren’t consulted; we saw it online. People are not the same, we don’t see things the same way and we just don’t like that it was out there. What if my mother had seen it?”