Surgeons managed to save a man who got a pitchfork wedged five inches deep into his skull.
A picture shows the victim, named Sergey P, with the four-pronged farm tool stuck in his head following an argument with another man in a car park in Novosibirsk, Russia.
He also sustained chest wounds from the tool’s spikes.
A man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.
Medics say it is ‘miraculous’ he did die or suffer critical brain injury.
Two neurosurgeons worked with thoracic, abdominal, eye specialists and two anaesthesiologists during a three-and-a-half hour operation to remove the spikes.
An emergency team cut the spikes so the surgeons could remove them one by one, fearing uncontrolled bleeding would kill Sergey if the entire tool was pulled out at once.
Deputy chief doctor Elena Domracheva said: ‘The patient was in a very serious condition – in addition to a head injury, he first received several serious blows to the chest with the same pitchfork.’
Neurosurgeon Anton Ponomarenko at the city’s hospital said the first prong went through the temporal bone into the retrobulbar space – behind the eyeball into the cavity of the eye socket.
’The [retrobulbar space] was sanitised under microscopic control. The fibula was filled with blood, but the optic nerve was not cut,’ he said.
The second prong entered the posterior cranial fossa.
‘After it was removed, bleeding started – the sigmoid sinus…was damaged,’ said the neurosurgeon.
’Literally 700ml of blood poured out in five minutes.’
They managed to stop the outpouring and found that the spike had ‘went literally half a centimetre from the brainstem across the entire base [of the skull]’.
He said: ‘Damage to the brainstem could have led to profound disability and even death.’
One other prong was embedded in him and was carefully extracted.
The patient was in intensive care for ten days and is now recovering.
‘The man avoided, among other things, severe bacterial meningitis [because] the pitchfork in his head was far from sterile,’ said a hospital spokesman.
He is expected to make a full recovery with a possibility only of a slight loss of vision in his right eye.
CCTV shows that Sergey was knocked to the ground following an ‘argument’ between ‘acquaintances’.
He was struck initially with a long-handled shovel.
A third man pulls the attacker away but the aggressor grabs the four-pronged pitchfork from the back of a truck.
Next he is seen repeatedly stabbing the sharp farming tool into his floored victim.
The victim’s sisters Svetlana, 20, and Olga, 49, personally thanked the rescuers offering them a cake.
The Russian Investigative Committee said in a statement: ‘A conflict broke out between male acquaintances.
’As a result, the accused struck the victim multiple times in the area of his vital organs.
’He failed to complete his intent to kill.’
The victim ‘was promptly provided with qualified assistance by the staff of a medical institution’.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
