A two-year-old child has had an amazing escape after falling on to a pencil that pierced her eye socket and penetrated almost 4cm into her skull.
The pencil came to rest just 1mm away from a major blood vessel that would almost certainly have meant severe brain damage or death for Wren Bowell.
It took surgeons four hours to operate on the girl and they had to remove a section of her skull to get the pencil out, but Wren escaped with no ill effects.
Her father, Martyn Bowell, 34, said: "The pencil missed her eye completely. We only found out afterwards that the pencil missed two major blood vessels and if it had gone a millimetre either way it could have been a lot worse if it had hit a third."
Wren, from Somerset, had been drawing in her bedroom and was running to show her parents what she had created when she tripped over a stairgate and the pencil went into her eye socket.
Bowell said: "The stairgate was there to keep her safe, but as she tripped over it while carrying the pencil she fell on to it. If anything happens to your child you are shocked.
"A broken bone would be bad enough, but something happening to the eye, head or brain is one of the worst things that could possibly go wrong."
The girl's mother, Michelle, a nursery nurse, realised that she should not try to get the pencil out but instead dialled 999. Wren was taken to Frenchay hospital in Bristol, where scans showed how far in the pencil was lodged.
Bowell said: "The pencil was stuck so hard that they had to pull part of her face off and take out part of her skull to take out the pencil. They then put Wren's skull back together with plastic plates and screws, which will biodegrade."
After the operation Wren spent three weeks in Frenchay with her family around her bedside before she was allowed home. The consultant neurosurgeon who operated on her, Ian Pople, said she was "incredibly lucky".
He said: "The pencil was within a millimetre of hitting a big blood vessel in the brain. It just skirted the top of the eye and that it didn't damage the eyeball itself was very fortunate."
Martyn Bowell has signed up for a first aid course since the accident and is raising money for Frenchay's children's unit so that it can buy new toys for its patients.