51 Years after car accident, a 7-inch long turn signal lever from a T-Bird was removed from his left arm.

Fifty-one years ago, Arthur Lampitt of Granite City, Illinois, smashed his 1963 Thunderbird into a truck. This week during surgery in suburban St. Louis, a 7-inch turn signal lever from that T-Bird was removed from his left arm.

The accident broke Lampitt's hip, drawing attention away from the arm, which healed. A decade or so ago, his arm set off a metal detector at a courthouse. An X-ray showed a slender object the length of a pencil, but since it caused no pain or hardship, Lampitt was told to let it be.

 He was moving concrete blocks a few weeks ago when the arm began to hurt for the first time. “Everything was fine until it started to get bigger,” Lampitt's wife, Betty, said. “The arm started bulging.”

 Lampitt decided to have surgery. He initially wasn't sure what was in the arm. He wondered if perhaps a medical instrument had been left during the emergency room visit in 1963.

 He unearthed a collection of old photos of the mangled Thunderbird taken by a friend at the scene. He noticed the metal blinker lever was missing from the left side of the steering column. He figured that was it, and surgery at City Place Surgery Center in Creve Coeur, Missouri, confirmed it.

Found on http://abcnews.go.com/Weird/wireStory/51-years-wreck-inch-car-part-found-arm-27948312  images from http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/granite-city-man-finds-out-what-s-been-hidden-in/article_d19e6473-80a3-51c8-bbb4-70f21d9e5904.html