How long can pencil lead stay in your body before it kills you?

I've yet to find out. But it's certainly more than a decade. When I was about 8, breakfasts were scenes of battle between my mum and us children.....

Mum's goal:
1. Get these two rascals to finish their homework before the schoolbus arrives.
2. Get these two rascals to finish their revision for today's spelling test before the schoolbus arrives.
3. Get these two rascals to finish the cereal/bread/ugly-looking-porridge before the schoolbus arrives.

Our goal:
1. Procrastinate long enough so that our mum would finish our homework for us.
2. Perform acts of retching that were convincing enough to a)get our mum to stop making us eat, b)not have to go to school.
3. Do whatever we want to do and be one with the world.

On that fateful morning, my mum was engaged in 1, 2 and 3, while i was happily engaged in 3. 3 being playing with my pencil and poking myself with the eraser at one end of the pencil. It was not my day. My mum somehow managed to distract me enough from my ritualistic meditation to cause me to jab myself hard in my right hand with the wrong end of my pencil (the lead end), leaving me staring for about 10 seconds at the pencil balancing precariously from the upper layers of my punctured flesh. The broken lead point was removed in the end, but not before the industrious pencil managed to leave a small trail of graphite that has survived in my hand till this day.

2 years later, the same thing happened, this time to my left wrist.

2 lessons: First, that graphite does not assimilate readily into the bloodstream, nor does it dissolve in tissue fluid. Second, that things which pierce often leave a trace of their passing. Not a scar (for my skin had quickly healed over the graphite), but a trace, locked into my flesh forever.

Wounds never heal completely, never. Even when it doesn't hurt anymore, one just has to flip to the right page in that vast sea of memory to notice that little grey spot, dark and jarring, staring straight back.