A Miami teenager is walking and talking in short sentences 11 days after doctors removed a 3-foot spear that had entered his head above his right eye and protruded from the back of his skull.

Yasser Lopez, 16, was accidentally shot in the head by a friend who was loading a spear gun during a fishing trip at a lake near his Miami-Dade home on June 8.

"It's a striking injury," said George Garcia, an Army trauma surgeon. "It's something you don't see every day, to have a patient awake and speaking with a 3-foot spear through his head."

Doctors from the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital and the Army Trauma Training Center told reporters that it was a miracle that the spear missed major blood vessels.

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