Close calls

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/07/2018 (2915 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s the sort of grisly scene you’d only expect to see in a B-grade horror movie, but it plays out in real life far more frequently than you might think.

We’re referring here to horrific incidents wherein innocent people are accidentally skewered by ordinary objects while engaged in everyday activities.

For instance, earlier this week, a British tourist made headlines around the world when she was impaled by a beach umbrella that had been turned into a flying missile by strong winds at the Jersey Shore.

According to dozens of news reports, Margaret Reynolds, 67, from London, was relaxing at a beach in Seaside Heights when strong winds caused a metal umbrella to pierce her ankle, pinning her to the sand.

News reports state the spike of the wind-blown umbrella went entirely through her ankle and first responders had to use a bolt cutter to free her and get her on an ambulance to hospital, where she was listed in good condition.

“It was a beautiful day and a gust of wind blew the umbrella,” Reynolds said in a statement released by Hackensack Meridian Health. “It was just an accident.”

One eyewitness, Instagram user Ricky Z, posted photos on social media, saying: “This lady had an umbrella go through her leg five feet away from me! That could’ve been me! That umbrella woman was reading a book and seconds later her leg was impaled to the sand.”

Tragically, this incident is just the pointed tip of a dangerous iceberg, as we see from today’s list of Five People That Made Headlines After Being Impaled in Freak Accidents:

5) The piercing object: A tree limb

Getting to the point: The headline in the June 30 edition of the New York Post pretty much says it all: “Driver miraculously survived being impaled by a falling tree.”

According to the Post and other news reports, 38-year-old Ozgur Hallacoglu was cruising along Brooklyn’s Belt Parkway near 88th Street around 7:45 a.m. that day when a massive tree limb smashed through the windshield of his red minivan — and continued clean through his torso.

With the branch piercing his abdomen, Hallacoglu’s minivan continued to swerve, hitting other cars on the road as it barrelled along the parkway before crashing into a centre median, according to police and witnesses at the scene.

“They took off the windshield and they took off the trunk and the whole entire roof of the car to get the gentleman who was driving,” Jessica Nocero, who came upon the brutal scene while running along the parkway bike path, told the Post.

“Huge tree,” Nocero added.

Rescuers painstakingly dismantled the minivan over the course of about an hour to reach Hallacoglu, then rushed him to hospital, where the branch had to be surgically removed from his abdomen while his anxious family waited. Later, a family friend, Hakan Turonc, told reporters the injured driver is facing a gruelling recovery but is expected to bounce back.

“His muscles, from his back to his stomach, are ripped,” Turonc said, noting his friend’s recuperation will include three more surgeries. “Yesterday, his family (spent) eight hours in the hospital. He is awake, (and) when something happens, he knows it’s happening. He will be fine.” Like they said, a miracle.

 

4) The piercing object(s): Bamboo poles

Getting to the point: Another day, another miracle. Surgeons and rescue crews say the driver of a three-wheeled motorcycle/pedicab miraculously escaped alive earlier this month after being impaled by four bamboo poles in a road accident in central China, according to reports in the South China Morning Post and other news sites.

The stories state the pedicab driver — identified only as 25-year-old Mr. Li — was pinned to his seat by the poles after crashing into the rear of a light truck in Yangxin county in Huangshi, Hubei province.

Moments after the crash, the bamboo poles, which were several metres long, slid backwards and smashed through the windshield of the pedicab, with four of them spearing the driver through the chest.

Firefighters quickly examined the precarious situation and decided their best option was to shorten the bamboo poles using hand-held cutters. Reports say rescuers spent more than an hour cutting through the poles so the driver could be freed.

“The situation was very tricky. We didn’t want to cause any further harm to the driver,” assistant chief Yang Quanwei told Beijing News.

Throughout the rescue, firefighters kept the driver talking to help him maintain consciousness. After being extricated, he was rushed to Huangshi Central Hospital, where the bamboo poles were removed by a team of surgeons.

Dr. Chen Jie told reporters that Mr. Li was “very lucky” because none of the long objects had pierced his internal organs.

“He’s awake and recovering after the surgery,” another doctor told the South China Morning Post.

 

3) The piercing object: A hay bale spike

Getting to the point: You are no doubt getting tired of hearing this, but it’s clearly a miracle the worker in our next story survived his pointed brush with death. It began as an ordinary day on June 27 for 43-year-old Idaho resident Justin Firth, but it turned into a life-or-death struggle when he was accidentally impaled by a three-inch-wide, 110-pound hay bale spike that fell off a loader parked nearby as he and his co-workers were setting up a fence at Southern Idaho Commodities in Jerome, Idaho.

The hay spear, which was still attached to the machine, went through Firth’s back and out of his stomach. Firth told the media he didn’t feel any pain and remained alert during the horrific incident. He recalls seeing a flash, feeling pressure on his back, looking down and seeing a spike sticking through his abdomen.

“Everyone started screaming and running and calling 911 and I was just stuck there,” he said. “I felt something hit me, and I went to the ground. I looked up to find out what happened and I (saw) that belt tine sticking through me and into the ground. I was pretty scared. It’s pretty mind-boggling.”

Paramedics lacked the tools to remove the spike from the front loader, so his co-workers used a torch to cut it off, even using industrial putty to prevent the heat from burning the young father.

When his wife, Anny, raced to the worksite, a police officer stopped her and said Justin had requested she not see him in that condition.

“I asked, ‘How bad is it, shoot straight with me, I don’t want it sugar-coated,’ and he said, ‘Anny, it’s not good,’” she told The Associated Press.

Cut free, the spike still sticking through his back, Firth was flown to hospital and spent 3-1/2 hours in surgery. Anny was able to tell Justin she loved him before the operation began.

One of the surgeons, Dr. Terrence Rager, said it’s amazing the spike went under his ribcage and missed hitting his spinal cord by a few millimetres.

“It’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen because it was a potentially catastrophic injury that’s going to have a really great outcome,” Rager said.

Declared the impaling victim: “This could’ve killed me instantly if it had just hit one way or the other. It could’ve paralyzed me.”

What would we call it? Guess!

 

2) The piercing object: A cow’s horns

Getting to the point: There are a lot of things on a farm that can kill you — or end up sticking through important parts of your anatomy. Just ask Victor Chestnutt, 58, vice-president of the Ulster Farmers’ Union, who marked Farm Safety Week in Ireland by revealing how he was nearly killed when he was speared by the horn of an aggressive Highland cow.

“When you get a group of farmers together talking about their near misses, it can be scary,” Chestnutt, who runs a livestock farm in County Antrim, told the Irish Independent newspaper. “I have been injured with cattle before. You always set your limits, but sometimes as you get older the cattle seem to get quicker.”

He went on to describe his unusual brush with death: “A number of years ago, I got done by a Highland cow, the type of one you see on the wrapper of Highland Toffee. She was quite a wicked wee cow and I knew that. I said she’d never get me, because I’d watch her.”

Famous last words, if you catch our drift.

“I went into a pen to get her out and the calf was in front of her, so I was fully expecting her to come forward,” the farmer recalled. “I went down beside another animal when I saw her racing towards me. I jumped through a barrier in a cattle shed, but she got my upper leg trapped with her horn. I was jumping when she caught me. But I fell into the next pen and she couldn’t get at me. If I had fallen into the same pen as the cow, she would have finished me off.”

Chestnutt required emergency surgery after being impaled by the horn, and says it was pure luck that he survived to tell the grisly tale.

“Animals are bigger and stronger than you,” he noted. “Things like this happen to a lot of people, but you can think, ‘It won’t happen to me.’ But you should be thinking, ‘I’m at risk, it could be me.’”

Talk about getting stuck on the horns of a dilemma.

 

1) The piercing object: A javelin

Getting to the point: We’re making this our lead item for two reasons: 1) A brief internet search reveals getting impaled by a javelin is frighteningly common; and 2) one of the incidents occurred in Manitoba.

According to CBC News, a female official was impaled by a javelin at a Canada Summer Games trial event last June at the University of Manitoba.

Young male athletes were competing when the wayward throwing spear struck the woman in the calf. Donna Harris, executive director of Athletics Manitoba, was quoted as saying the official received immediate medical attention and was taken to hospital. It was called a “freak accident” caused in part by the rainy and windy weather.

“Harris described the event as traumatic for those involved, but said the official did not have any injuries to her bones or major blood vessels and is expected to recover. The spear went through a part of her calf muscle.”

We hate to call the official lucky, but it could have been much worse. In 2012, for example, a junior track-and-field meet in Dusseldorf, Germany, ended in horror when a javelin struck and killed a 74-year-old judge.

According to news reports, judge Dieter Strack entered the field to measure before the javelin landed. “He was hit in the head, in the cheek and also sustained a wound to his carotid artery,” a spokesman for a nearby fire department was quoted as saying.

In 2016, a Chinese university student was accidentally impaled in the back by a javelin thrown by a fellow student in physical education class. Witnesses said the incident was an accident and left blood spewing from the wound on his back. Surgeons required the help of firefighters to remove a severed section of the javelin remaining in the boy’s back.

There are literally dozens of similar alarming stories we could share with you today, but we strongly suspect — and forgive us for this next bit — you get the point.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca