A man in Creve Coeur, Missouri is recovering after a rather unusual surgery. He recently had begun to experience pain his arm. It felt as if there was a pointed object poking him from inside his arm. In fact, there was. He had known there was a long metal object in his arm for some time, after setting off a metal detector in a courthouse years earlier.

It was the source of that metal object that was unusual. After surgeons completed their work, they presented him with the turn-signal lever from a 1963 Ford Thunderbird. How it got there was almost as suspiring as the fact that it had remained there for 51 years.

In 1963, he was involved with a head-on accident with his Thunderbird. The car accident was severe enough to be reported, incorrectly, as a fatal accident. He survived, but suffered a serious injury, which broke his hip. His arm was cut and bleeding, but gave him no unusual pain.

It wasn’t until the incident with the metal detector and an X-ray decades later that he grew to suspect what it was. A friend had taken photos of the crash, and he noticed there was no turn-signal lever on the left side of the steering column.

The lever was about the size of the object in the X-ray. Doctors advised since it caused no pain, not to risk surgery to remove it. When it recently began to hurt, he had no choice, and he was confident that the object would turn out to be the lever, which it did.

It was remarkable that an object as large as the lever did not cause an infection in his arm.

Car accidents often leave their victims with life-long injuries, that can cast a pall over the remainder if their lives, but it is rare indeed to have to wait 51 years to discover an injury.

Stltoday.com, “Granite City man finds out what’s been hidden in his arm for 51 years,” Jesse Bogan, January 1, 2015