A Chinese man was shocked to find two human teeth embedded in his face days after accidentally colliding with another person during a basketball game.

The unnamed man was reportedly back in his home city of Dongguan, China’s Guangdong Province, for the Lunar New Year, when he was invited to a basketball game by some childhood friends. At one point while trying to recover a rebound, the man collided with another player; at first, he thought the man’s chin had hit the left side of his head, right above the eye, but then he saw the other guy bleeding from his mouth and saying that he had lost two of his teeth. While he went to wash the blood pouring from his wound, everyone else was busy looking for the other player’s teeth, but they were nowhere to be found…

Photo: Quang Tri NGUYEN/Unsplash

After the unfortunate collision, no one was in the mood for basketball anymore, so the protagonist of this bizarre story went to have his wound checked out at the nearest clinic, because it wouldn’t stop bleeding. The physician there cleaned the wound and told him that it was nothing serious and that he should continue disinfecting it daily until it closed completely.

The man did as the doctor advised, but on the 29th of January, six days after the accidental collision, he noticed a rancid smell coming out of the wound above his eye. Panicked that the cut had become infected, he rushed to the emergency room where doctors thoroughly checked the wound and extracted two chipped teeth from it.

Knowing exactly where those teeth had come from, the man told the baffled doctors the whole story, and then shared it on social media along with photos of the embedded teeth and his facial wound. The story quickly went viral and was eventually picked up by major news outlets.