A Japanese man was left fighting for his life when his chair collapsed and he was impaled by a metal pipe.
The 51-year-old was sitting on a foldable chair at home when it crumbled, landing him on top of a rigid pipe that penetrated his anus.
He lay bleeding on the bathroom floor for an hour after being impaled before a relative found him and called for an ambulance. He was in shock when paramedics arrived, having lost a significant amount of blood.
At the hospital, doctors performed a series of scans to determine the extent of the damage, particularly to the iliac vein and artery – major blood vessels that supply blood to the lower body.
They cut into the man’s abdomen to better assess the damage and did not find any active bleeding. Additionally, a collection of blood that had formed there – called a hematoma – had not grown larger, suggesting the bleeding was controlled.
The impaled pipe narrowly avoided a potentially catastrophic injury to a nearby artery that would have led to high-pressure bleeding if punctured.
Doctors’ reporting of the case did not say if the man arrived at the hospital with the foreign object still inside him that doctors had to remove or if it had come out on its own at home.
While the man was recovering well after his hospital stay, a day after being discharged he developed swelling in his leg, a sign of a blood clot there, as well as one that had traveled to his lungs.
The man, 51, was sitting on a folding chair in his home in Japan when it suddenly collapsed, landing him upon a metal pipe that penetrated him (stock)
The blue arrow points to a hematoma, or collection of blood, around the iliac vein, which helped control the bleeding after the man was impaled by a pipe
The man’s injury was far milder than it could have been had the pipe punctured the iliac artery, which would have led to rapid internal bleeding.
Instead, the pipe punctured the man’s right iliac vein – which proves fatal in 25 to 80 percent of incidences – but narrowly missed the artery because of the specific angle of the pipe when it entered the man’s body.
After determining the pipe had not damaged the artery while noting the damage to the man’s rectum, doctors performed a colostomy – a procedure that creates an opening in the abdomen for the colon to pass waste.
He was in the hospital for 11 days, and his condition improved slowly. Gradually he regained the ability to walk and eat solid foods.
Doctors allowed him to go home.
But four days later, the man knew something was wrong.
His right leg had begun to swell to the point where he decided he had to go to the hospital and was admitted three days later.
At that point, doctors performed a CT scan that revealed a blood clot in the right common iliac vein, along with a pulmonary embolism (PE), which is a blood clot that traveled to the lungs.
In this CT scan after the patient was discharged the first time, doctors found a blood clot in the left iliac artery, marked by the blue arrow. They also found a blood clot that had traveled to the man’s lungs
Doctors gave him an IV version of a common blood thinner for a day, which would prevent additional clotting.
The following day, the researchers said, the patient wanted to go home, ‘citing an inability to tolerate the hospital environment.’
Doctors acquiesced and sent the man home with a blood thinner to take by mouth every day with the promise to return for regular follow-up appointments, according to the account published in the American Journal of Case Reports.
‘Since then, the patient has regularly attended outpatient follow-up appointments without any recurrence of lower-extremity swelling, and he has resumed driving without issues,’ they said.
Regular checks of blood markers showed no signs of the blood clot (DVT) or pulmonary embolism (PE) coming back.
