A worker in central India has made what doctors describe as a miraculous recovery after an iron rod impaled his skull in a horrific construction site injury.
The 21-year-old was working on repairs in a well in the Balaghat district of Madhya Pradesh when he fell early on April 10 and the rod pierced his skull and brain.
He was taken to hospital but later transferred to a specialist facility in another state for surgery.
“He was hypertensive. He was in shock when he was brought in. The surgery took 90 minutes,” said Pramod Giri, neurosurgeon at the Neuron Brain Spine and Critical Care Centre at Nagpur in Maharashtra state.
The rod had entered his right temporal region and exited through the left frontal lobe, missing a major blood channel by millimeters. “Fortunately, the rod did not pierce any major blood vessels in the brain,” Giri said.
It took a team of six doctors at the Nagpur hospital to safely extract the rod from the man’s skull.
He regained consciousness a few hours after surgery and suffered no brain trauma, doctors said. He is expected to be discharged later this week.
“Patient is doing fine post-operatively and we are taking care to prevent meningitis,” Giri wrote in a report headlined “Miraculous Escape.”