An elderly woman in India is very lucky to be alive after falling on a metal rod in her backyard.
The woman, whose identity has not been released, was treated in Manipal India for the horrific injury. The woman was taking care of a herd of cows in a pasture near her home In India when she fell backside-first onto a rust, two-foot-long metal spike sticking out of the ground. The metal rod penetrated the woman’s rectum, and was lodged behind her peritoneum.
Doctors say the injury, as bad as it was, was also miraculous as it spared her internal organs. It is rare for an impalement to avoid damaging major blood vessels or vital organs, according to the write up about her case in International Journal of Surgery Case Reports.
Of course, the woman needed to get a tetanus shot and treatment with antibiotics to stave off the high likelihood of infection. The rod was filthy, covered in cow manure and who knows what microorganisms.
Surgery to repair the damage took two hours. Doctors were able to remove the rod by carefully pulling it back through her rectum. Once they did, the tear inside her could be seen and sutured.
The woman said the iron rod was placed in the pasture to support creeping vine plans. When she went out to tend the cows, she said, “it was dark and raining.” She brought her own cow to graze and tethered herself to the animal with a rope wrapped around her wrist.
The cow became “agitated” and “started pulling on me with force,” the woman recounted. As she was “an old lady,” she lost her balance and went down onto the rod with her buttocs first. It all happened so fast, she said, that for a while she did not realize that she had impaled herself.
The woman couldn’t walk and had to scream for aid until she was heard by family and neighbors. One of them bundled her into a car to a local clinic where a doctor called for an ambulance to take her to a fully equipped hospital.
After the reparative surgery the woman said she felt sick to her stomach and had abdominal pain and could not walk. But within a few days the pain had gone and she was on her feet again.
A woman in Florida this summer was impaled on a beach umbrella, but the implement only pierced her leg.
