She Thought Popcorn Was Stuck In Mouth, Pulls Out Something VERY Different

After feeling something out-of-place in the roof of her mouth, Ashley Smith started digging around in there to get it out. She thought some popcorn had probably gotten lodged, but she pulled out something completely different. Now she has a souvenir she’ll keep with her forever, that also solves an 11-year mystery.

The unlikely oral discovery happened about a week ago, when something from her past came back in a very unexpected way. Eleven years prior to her sudden feeling of needing to floss, the Georgia woman was 15-years-old and three months pregnant, when she went to visit her grandma. She told WLBT the she was hanging out with family, when a neighbor down the street was doing something else in his kitchen that would ultimately cause the teen (at the time) and her child, complications for years to come.

“We were all hanging out,” Smith recalled in a recent interview with the news station. “A guy that lived down the street from us had a gun that he took from his uncle, and he was in the kitchen playing with it. He pulled the trigger and said it wasn’t loaded and I was in the line of fire.”

Smith was struck by the irresponsible man’s stray bullet. Although she survived, she and her unborn baby suffered many consequences. In the time since being hit, the now 26-year-old has endured an aneurysm, two brain and ear surgeries, and an eye surgery. The damage ultimately resulted in her going blind in that eye and having to get a prosthetic replacement. To make matters worse, the baby girl she was pregnant with when it happened, was later born with unspecified complications, due to the lack of oxygen she received during the accident.

“When the bullet hit, it caused the bullet to go up,” Smith explained about the moment of impact that would forever change her life. “It ricochet hit the top of my skull went across my face and this was the stopping point, about the middle of my jaw,” she added, along with the fact that doctors told her the bullet would forever be lodged in her jawbone. But now, over a decade later, Smith proved physicians wrong.

On December 16, the now mother of three went to the restroom to try to pull out what she thought was probably a lodged kernel. After a few tugs at what was stuck in the roof of her mouth, it plopped out onto her tongue, which she then coughed out onto the floor. To her complete shock, it was the single bullet that had changed her life forever, eleven years earlier.

Despite some soreness in her jaw for a few days, Smith is happy to have it out. She has always remained positive through her many medical challenges, since she considers each day she wakes up and is still alive to be a miracle. Through so many delicate surgeries and a life-threatening accident, she wasn’t guaranteed these days, and she treats each one as a gift. Now she can keep the bullet in her pocket as a reminder that no weapon can be formed against her, for she will prosper.