NOSTALGIA: A '˜pane' in the backside

The only trouble the potentially lethal splinter caused him was a “pain in the backside”.

What Ken believed to be a small and harmless swelling on one of his buttocks turned out to be the piece of glass finally coming to the surface.

Ken’s staggering story began in 1955 when he was involved in a car accident.

The near-fatal crash left him in hospital, impaled with hundreds of glass fragments from the windscreen of his Morris Minor.

He defied the surgeon’s diagnosis that he had 10 hours to live, and over the next few years the fragments which the medics were unable to extract worked their way out of his body.

More than 30 years after the glass stopped emerging, another splinter appeared. “One day I sat down and felt a pain in my backside,” said Ken, who did not know what it was at first.

When he got to the bottom of the problem, he found a thin piece of glass, two inches long and 1/4 inch thick.

“It’s a very unusual story, but it does happen,” said an NGH doctor.