Elderly Man Impaled With Pruning Shears

August 31, 2011 at 9:05 am by Morbid  

TUCSON, AZ – Earlier this week we had a story about a woman who survived a tree branch impaling her through the eye socket and touching her brain.

Now we have an elderly man who has survived pruning shears impaling him through the eye socket — handle first — and lodging themselves in his neck.

Leroy Luetscher, 86, was bending over to pick up some pruning shears he had dropped while doing some gardening last month when he lost his balance and fell on top of them with his face.

As you can see by the accompanying, cringe-inducing x-ray, the handle of the shears entered through the mans eye socket and went down into his neck.

Luetscher said he realized he had picked up the tool in one of the worst ways possible after he stood up and felt the shears sticking out of his face. He also stated it was the worst pain he had ever experienced in his life.

“I didn’t know if my eyeball was still there or what,” Luetscher told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “The pain was so bad that I guess I wasn’t afraid to die.”

Using his shirt in an attempt to stop the bleeding, Leutscher walked into the house to show his girlfriend his new accessory. Presumably mortified, she called 911.

Luetscher was taken by ambulance to University Medical Center in Tucson, where a team of surgeons were amazed at what they were looking at.

“It was a bit overwhelming,” said Polonski, one of Luetscher’s surgeons. “It was wedged in there so tightly, you could not move it. It was part of his face.”

“The handle was actually resting on the external carotid artery in his neck,” said Lynn Polonski, a clinical assistant professor of ophthalmology.

But the surgeons were not only able to safely remove the shears, they were also able to save Leutscher’s eye.

In fact, the only side effects Luetscher is suffering since the surgery is some swelling of his eyelids and minor double vision.

Polonski said Luetscher is a lucky man. Had the shears went a little bit in any other direction, they could have ruptured his eye ball, hit his brain or severed his carotid artery.

Seems like Tucson, Arizona is the place to be if you want to survive being skullf*cked by a gardening tool as the team of surgeons that operated on Luetscher are the same ones who operated on U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot in the head.

26 Comments

• 

• Tweet