Not much good can happen when you send a bare foot smashing into someone's jaw. But during a summer beach brawl, a kick to the face caused one man to get part of his opponent's tooth stuck in his right foot.

Published in the Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery, this case is the first to report a tooth "traumatically implanted in the foot." 

The case describes a 29-year-old Croatian man who came to the hospital emergency room complaining of swelling and severe pain in his right foot. At first, he claimed he had stepped on a piece of glass while walking on the beach.

The man had a wound on the sole of is right foot in the gap of skin between his third and fourth toe. When doctors x-rayed the foot, they didn't find a shard of glass but saw "an opaque object" that resembled a human tooth.

So, they questioned the patient again and this time he came clean.

He admitted that two weeks earlier he had been involved in a fight with another guy on the beach. He had been wearing flip-flops but they flew off during the scuffle as he kicked his opponent in the jaw with his right foot.

That strike to the jaw broke off one of his opponent's teeth, which then embedded itself beneath the man's right foot.

Ten days after the brawl when pus from the wound started to ooze out, the man went to see his doctor about his injury. But he didn't fess up to the fight, and his doctor cleaned the wound and prescribed an antibiotic to reduce the risk of infection.

When the pain did not let up, he headed to the emergency room and that's when the tooth was discovered. The doctors decided to surgically remove it because the skin had developed an abscess.

"We consider all foreign body puncture wounds to be 'dirty,' " says Zenon Pogorelić, MD, the case study lead author and a pediatric surgeon at the University Hospital Split in Split, Croatia. Dr. Pogorelić removed the tooth from the patient's foot, and says that because human saliva contains nearly 200 different species of micro-organisms, this can also increase a person's risk for infection.

From the looks of it, the surgeon's suspect the tooth was an incisor from the front part of his opponent's mouth.

Stepping on toothpicks, sewing needles, glass, metal, and insect stingers are the most common objects to cause deep cuts to the sole of the foot. Finding a human tooth there is a rarity, although the medical literature describes unusual cases where a tooth has been found in the tongue, throat, sinuses, and ear canal.

The wound eventually healed, and "the patient returned to his regular activities 15 days after the operation." Let's hope those regular activities didn't include putting his foot into another person's mouth.

More tales of misplaced things:

• Engineer lived with bullet in his head for 8 decades
• Swallowed pen still works 25 years later
• Woman's breast implant disappears during Pilates

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New England Journal of Medicine

This image shows the bullet that was lodged in an 85-year-old man's head -- specifically, his foraman magnum -- for more than 80 years.

When a Russian man was only 3, his older brother accidentally shot him with a pistol. More than eight decades later, the bullet was still there, according to a case report just published online in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. 

The bullet hit the little boy right below the nose and eventually lodged itself in his foramen magnum, the opening in the bottom of the skull that allows the spinal cord to pass through and connect to the brain. The 3-year-old lost consciousness for several hours. At the time, a doctor examined the poor kid, but didn't remove the bullet for fear of causing more harm than good, says Dr. Marat Ezhov of Moscow's Cardiology Research Center, who examined the patient more than 80 years later. Incredibly, the boy recovered completely. 

"The body has an amazing ability to 'get used to' things," explains Dr. Richard O'Brien, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians. "Also, children have a great ability to overcome hardship and rebuild themselves when injured."

Eighty-two years later, Ezhov and Dr. Maya Safarova were treating the man at the cardiology center for his coronary heart disease. His patient history included the story of the accidental shooting, so doctors did a CT scan to check it out, which revealed the stowaway bullet. But the bullet had left no sign of neural damage -- further evidenced by the man's successful career as an award-winning engineer. 

"High-speed missiles, like a bullet, can cause great damage and usually do," explains Dr. David Ross, an emergency physician at Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, Colo. "However, because they are high-speed, they generate a lot of heat. That heat usually means the missile is sterile -- meaning it is unlikely to serve as a basis for infection if it stays in one place for many years. So if it did not cause much damage, which it apparently didn't, it was unlikely to cause him ongoing troubles."

A weird little detail: Ezhov notes that the during his engineering career, the man oversaw construction of ballistic missles.

Doctors at the Russian cardiology center decided that at this point, the bullet didn't need to be removed -- after all, he was in good condition, Ezhov noted, and he had been doing well for decades. Besides, even his scar wasn't affecting his life negatively -- the bullet did leave a scar under his nose, but his curved, Roman nose keeps it invisible, Safarova said in an email. 

Related:

• Swallowed pen still works 25 years later
• Woman's breast implant disappears during Pilates

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When twins Danielle and Nicole Fisher gave birth to baby boys within minutes of one another, people wondered whether it was the result of some sort of special twin telepathy. After all, what are the chances that two young women would get pregnant within weeks of one another and then deliver 13 minutes apart?

The duo insists they didn’t consciously plan to get pregnant together. Twenty-three year old Nicole Fisher put it down to the “twin thing.” “It just has something to do with that twin communication,” she told her hometown New Jersey newspaper, The Courier-Post.

But twin experts aren’t ready to explain this away with ESP.

“I’ve heard of these things happening before,” said Nancy Segal, a professor of psychology at California State University at Fullerton and author of “Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior.” “It’s fascinating. But I don’t think there’s any kind of ESP going on.”

Segal thinks the more likely explanation is shared genetics. While genes aren’t destiny, she said, they tend to greatly influence our lives.

“Twins’ lives tend to be in synch, particularly identical twins,” Segal said. “And you could see how genetics might come into play when it comes to the ease of conception, for example.”

Segal has interviewed hundreds of twins and for the most part she hasn’t come across many instances of any special sort of twin communication.

“They can have very close connections,” Segal said. “They can spend a lot of time together because they get along so well.”

It’s not just the power of genes that makes twins feel so close, said Ricardo Ainslie, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “The Psychology of Twinship.”

“They grow up together in the same developmental context,” Ainslie said. “That’s very powerful. And because of it there will always be a kind of intimacy between twins that doesn’t exist between siblings that are different ages.”

Model Lauren Scruggs, who lost her left eye after being struck by an airplane propeller, has a fraternal twin sister, Brittany. In a recent post on CaringBridge.org, their mom, Cheryl Scruggs, reported that Brittany’s left eye had been twitching for days. “She knows it’s because of their deep connection she and Lo have, and God allowing her to go through this with her at the ‘twin’ level,” she wrote.

Still, the whole mythology of twin ESP can be oppressive, Ainslie said. Some twins even feel they come up short because they can’t communicate telepathically.

“When I interviewed twins,” Ainslie said, “I asked about this phenomenon. And what is interesting is that many twins seemed to feel that they didn’t measure up to that myth. They’d say ‘My twin and I try to communicate in these ways. Maybe we’re just not as twin-like as other twins.’” 

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Bas Czerwinski / AP file

Monique van der Vorst, paralyzed since age 13, says a crash two years ago reversed her paralysis. Um. We have so many questions.

It sounds like a plot right out of a TV movie: A woman paralyzed since the age of 13 miraculously regains feeling in her legs and is able to walk again after being injured in a traffic accident.

But that’s exactly what 27-year-old Monique van der Vorst says happened to her two years ago. Van der Vorst had turned to hand-cycling after losing feeling in her legs as a teen. She got so good that she won two silver medals in the Paralympics.

Two years ago while she was on the road training for the 2012 Paralympics, Van der Vorst was mowed down by a speeding bicyclist.

While in the hospital after the collision with the bicyclist, van der Vorst says she suddenly developed a tingling in her legs -- and within a year she was walking again. This week the announcement came that she’d joined a pro-cycling team and was looking forward to competing at the Olympics as an able-bodied athlete.

Van der Vorst’s doctors haven’t been able to come up with an explanation for her miraculous recovery -- and neither could any of the doctors interviewed by msnbc.com.

With the caveat that it’s impossible to comment on a specific patient without seeing actual medical records, physicians agreed that it was unlikely that anyone who had lost all feeling in their lower extremities could be healed by being hit hard in an accident.

“I have never heard of a case of damage to the spinal cord where someone lost feeling and strength in their legs and then had a second accident that gave them feeling back,” said Dr. Michael Boninger, professor and chair of the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and director of the rehabilitation institute at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “The fundamental truth is that accidents don’t cause damaged nerve cells to regenerate.”

Still, Boninger added, “I would have to also say that there’s a lot in medicine that we don’t know and a lot we have yet to learn.”

The cases where you do see recovery tend to be those in which patients still have some feeling and ability to move right after a spinal injury, said Dr. Bruce Dobkin, professor of neurology and director of the Neurologic Rehabilitation and Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If some sensation and movement is retained after such an injury (as in most of the athletes injured on a football field), recovery of walking is likely in 90 percent of cases,” he added. “The process of improvement after such an injury can take up to a year after the incomplete cord injury.”

Van der Vorst says she initially lost feeling in her legs after suffering nerve damage from an ankle operation when she was 13. That problem was compounded by a later car accident in which her spine was injured.

If a person’s peripheral nerves -- the ones that run from the spinal cord to the extremities -- are damaged, they can at least partially regenerate, Dobkin said. “The longest nerves, the ones that move the toes and ankles, may take 18 months to partially regrow, but do not always extend far enough to improve voluntary movement,” he explained. “So, rehab specifically aimed at improving whatever voluntary movement is available can benefit a patient at any time, but is most valuable in the first 12 to 18 months after an injury.”

What do you think of van der Vorst's recovery story? 

Related: 

• Paralympian, un-paralyzed by crash, now eyes Olympics
• 'Exoskeleton' lets paraplegic student walk at graduation

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