According to his doctors, Frank Vaorin had several guardian angels: While pruning trees in his garden in Cuxhaven, the 55-year-old fell from a ladder four meters deep onto a fence pole – and was impaled by it. Against all odds, he survived the accident, as the Bremen-Mitte Clinic announced on Tuesday. The rusty metal rod, more than a meter long, drilled itself next to the anus, through the stomach, past the right colon, past vital vessels and the liver, through the diaphragm and into the chest. According to a press release from the clinic, it also spared the lungs, pierced some ribs and emerged below the collarbone.
“The fact that the rod did not injure a single organ is practically a miracle. I have never experienced such a case in my entire career,” said chief physician Professor Hüseyin Bektas. According to the information, if the man had fallen onto the pole in a slightly different way, the accident could have been fatal. “The patient didn’t just have one guardian angel, there must have been many,” said Bektas. For him, the case was so unique that he wanted to describe it in international journals.
The patient and the rod were brought to the hospital by rescue helicopter, where teams from general and visceral surgery as well as thoracic surgery operated on him and freed him from the rod. The fire brigade had to cut him free from the fence beforehand. “I was conscious the whole time,” Vaorin said. His 21-year-old son witnessed the accident and informed the emergency services. “I remember hanging there on the bar with my feet in the air. My son quickly pushed something under my feet to stop the bar from slipping any further,” said Vaorin. Now the wounds have to heal and father and son have to mentally process the accident, as the clinic announced. “I’m just happy that I’m still alive,” emphasized Vaorin.
