Impaled on grill of a gate, man saved by a whisker

CHENNAI: At 2am on May 20, on-duty cardiothoracic surgeon Dr K S Saravana Krishna Raja received a call from the trauma ward of the government general hospital. “I thought I heard the caller wrong when he said a patient had reported with a gate pierced through him,” said Dr Raja. When he rushed to the ward, he found 29-year-old Vetrivel lying prone on a stretcher with part of a three-feet-long grill inside him.
Around midnight on May 19, Vetrivel, a driver who stayed with his employer in Nungambakkam, had attempted to jump over the closed grill gate. He missed a step and a pointed edge of a grill pierced his back. For close to half an hour, he cried for help, before bystanders noticed his impaled body on the gate.

At 1am, the police, who had rushed to the spot, alerted the 108 ambulance service. Fire services personnel used hydraulic cutters to slice the gates, leaving the pierced portion inside. This, doctors say, is what saved Vetrivel’s life. “The pierced part was less than an inch from his heart,” said Dr A Sivaraman, chief of cardiothoracic department at GH. “If they had tried to dislodge the grill, death would been instantaneous.”

Vetrivel was brought to the hospital at 2am. CT scans revealed that the rusted grill had pierced through the thoracic cavity, punctured his left lung and was lodged very close to the aorta, the largest artery, and the heart. “He was drowsy and in pain, but other than that all his vitals — his blood pressure and heart beat rate — were normal,” said Dr Sivaraman.

Two and a half hours after the accident, Vetrivel was operated on. The patient was made to lie in semi-prone position during the procedure, which went on for two hours. The grill was extricated with extreme caution and the damaged portion of the lung was sutured.

The case was unlike anything doctors in the hospital had seen. “It was bizarre. We have had patients being brought in with knives still stabbed into them, but never a gate,” said Dr Sivaraman. Vetrivel, who was under observation for more than a week, can walk normally again.