IT WAS only after Aaron Toward-Parker’s victim had stopped punching the teen that the 21-year-old realised there was a foot-long zombie knife wedged in his buttocks.

The labourer backed away from the hooded youngster, fleeing back to his nearby flat before calling paramedics.

Judge Peter Crabtree said it was a good thing neither the stab victim nor his two friends had attempted to remove the fearsome blade from his lower back.

The combat-style knife had sliced through fat, remarkably missing sensitive muscle and vital blood vessels. But the serrated blade could easily have churned through tissue if it had been removed inexpertly.

READ MORE: 11 years and 8 months for teen who stabbed man in the lower back with zombie knife

Instead, it was surgeons at Great Western Hospital who gently eased the blade out of his buttocks and lower back using metal rulers to ensure the serrated blade did not do further damage.

The judge said it was an understatement to say the victim of the stabbing had been remarkably fortunate.

In a victim personal statement read to the court, Toward-Parker’s 21-year-old victim said the stabbing had left him in excruciating pain. He was taken to Great Western Hospital, where surgeons used metal rulers to carefully slide out the knife without the blade’s serrated edge doing any more damage.

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An x-ray of the zombie knife in the victim's buttocks and lower back

The wound was sutured on one side, while the other was packed with gauze and had to be regularly cleaned.

His pain was such that the self-employed labourer spent weeks off work, debts had piled up and he had struggled to cuddle his young daughter.

He told the court: “Every aspect of my life has somehow been affected by what happened and some things will never be the same again.

“I missed out on parts of my daughter’s life that I can’t ever get back and my relationship with my partner suffered too.

“So, not only my life has been affected but my family’s too.”

READ MORE: Knife warning from police after buttocks stabbing case

He spent two nights in hospital and had to visit the doctors’ surgery daily for five weeks to have his wound “packed from the inside out”.

“I’d never felt pain like in my life like the first few days of having my dressing changed,” he told the court.

He constantly suffered flashbacks and became anxious when he looked from his flat’s windows to the park where he was stabbed. And he was unable to return to play football for months after the attack.

But the most devastating result of the stabbing was that he could not bend down to pick up his one-year-old daughter.

He wrote: “As a father that kills me.”