IT’S the stuff of nightmares – an accident you wouldn't ever think could happen.
But one unlucky woman was impaled by a pole after she fell onto her Christmas tree – and still lives to tell the tale.
The 54-year-old unnamed woman, from Newry, Northern Ireland, said she “owed her life” to the medics who treated her.
Her case was described by doctors in the medical journal Clinical Case Reports.
Dimitrios Angelou and colleagues at Daisy Hill Hospital were writing about the importance of swift action in hospitals when it comes to traumatic injuries.
They said: “Our patient is a 54-year-old lady who fell from a stepladder onto the metallic base of an artificial Christmas tree causing the stem of the tree to impale her through her right buttock into her pelvis.
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“Despite the impressive mechanism of injury, there was no immediate life-threatening bleed…”
Horrific scans show the severity of the woman’s injury and begs the question – how on earth did she survive?
An X-ray of the woman’s pelvis shows the metal rod entering the pelvis from the right side, diagonally to the left.
The paper said the fire brigade took an hour and a half just to cut off the metal pole so that the woman could fit into the CT scanner.
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The patient was transferred to the local Major Trauma Centre for expert surgery.
But she suffered significant delays “due to the lack of clear transfer pathways”.
The paper did not include details on how the pole was removed, or how long it took the patient to recover.
The woman wrote: “Just want to add that I received excellent care and attention from ambulance to hospital.
“All staff at hospital were extremely kind and supportive and simply owe my life to them.
“The aftercare from my local community was incredible also.
“The whole accident was a very worrying time for my family but fortunately I've recovered fully. Thank you so much.”
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Other shocking recent case reports include a man who had a bottle of water stuck up his rectum, causing him constipation for three days.
And doctors described the case of a man who ended up with an “eggplant” deformity of his penis after feeling a “crack” during sex.
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