Not wanting to take advantage of my stubborn German/Scotch heritage here, but let's just use that by now very trite saying of "thinking out of the box" for a bit.
If the apostle John was shown a vision of a man having brain surgery of some kind by scalpel or even laser, how would he describe it? Would it look to him as though it was a sword? I will try to noodle around online given the chance to see if I can come up with anything that seems to fit a puzzle piece in. For some reason this entire situation won't let go of me quite yet. Thank you for the verse, I understand what you are saying.