12-Year-Old Boy Survives Pencil Piercing Heart

HELENA, Mont. — A 12-year-old boy whose heart was pierced by a pencil as he lunged toward his bed to catch a football is recuperating after 2 1/2 harrowing hours of the pencil throbbing at every beat in his chest.

“I kind of felt it go in, but it didn’t hurt,” Nathan King said from his home in Helena. “So I looked down. Then I started yelling for Mom. I was yelling ‘Mom! Mom! Mom! I’m gonna die!’ ”

Crying and struggling to breathe, Nathan stumbled into the kitchen with the eraser end protruding 2 to 3 inches from his chest. He collapsed in front of his mother, Lorri Earley, with the pencil throbbing like a metronome. It was Nathan’s birthday, Feb. 23.

Earley, a nurse, called 911 and held her son to keep him from pulling at the pencil.

He was rushed to St. Peter’s Community Hospital in Helena, then flown to Benefis Healthcare in Great Falls for open-heart surgery.

The pencil had penetrated his right heart chamber, ripped a valve and was embedded in the septum, near the back wall of the heart. “It was a time bomb,” said Dr. Brett Williams. “If blood had started leaking into the sack around the heart, this could have had a completely different outcome.”

Had anyone but the surgeon removed the pencil, Nathan would have died within minutes, Williams said.

Nathan arrived home last week, but he will miss school for a while. Sports are out of the question for about six months, but Nathan says he feels OK.

To welcome him home, neighbors gave him a sweatshirt that shows a heart pierced by a wooden pencil. The words: “Tougher than Dracula.”