Thursday, November 15, 1990
Associated Press
(from PostNet archives)
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TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - An 8-year-old boy impaled on a half-inch-thick steel rod improved to serious condition Wednesday, just two days after the thick spike punched through his heart and destroyed a jugular vein in his neck.
''This is one in a billion,'' said Dr. Phillip Richemont, one of three University Medical Center surgeons who spent almost 2 1/2 hours Monday extracting the section of steel rod from Justin Stiner's chest and neck.
The 4-foot-10, 86-pound third-grader fell off the roof of a house in Sierra Vista while playing with a friend Monday. He fell onto a 4-foot section of the threaded rod - similar to ''rebar'' used for reinforcing concrete - that was sticking out of the ground.
Surgeons were stunned to find that although the rod had pierced the heart in two places and divided the jugular vein, ''it didn't bleed. It's amazing,'' Richemont said. The heart tissue seemingly ''contracted down between the threads,'' cutting off bleeding, Richemont said.
Justin hung on the rod about 2 feet off the ground for about 20 minutes, alert the whole time, before paramedics cut off a 2 1/2-foot piece of the rod without disturbing the 18-inch section that penetrated his body.
He was flown by helicopter about 80 miles to Tucson. Paramedics said the boy was calm throughout the trip to the hospital.
The rod was unscrewed from Justin's neck and body while the boy was on a heart-bypass machine, Richemont said.
The bar had pierced his body several inches above the navel and just below the breastbone. It tore through the bottom of his heart's right ventricle and exited the top of the chamber.
''He would have bled to death'' if it had been on the left side, Esser said. ''He's one lucky kid. It just didn't hit any arterial structures.'' The right side of the heart has about one-third the blood pressure of the left side.
After leaving the heart, the rod missed the aorta and pulmonary arteries, cut the thymus gland, tore the right interior jugular vein in half and skimmed off the carotid artery but did not exit his neck.
The boy's severed jugular, which returns blood from the head to the heart, was simply tied off, but that will pose no problems because other veins would provide needed circulation, Esser said.