Man lanced with 1.5-meter-long steel bar – and survives

A man was lanced from head to bottom after he fell five meters onto a 1.5-meter-long steel bar on a construction site. He was miraculously saved from death after hours of delicate surgery. The man, surnamed Zhang, fell directly onto the steel bar at the construction site in Jinan city, Shandong Province on Tuesday. He was immediately transferred to the Qilu Hospital, where he received an operation that lasted more than five hours. Up to nine doctors helped to prevent the 0.7-centimeter diameter steel bar from further hurting Zhang while it was being carefully extracted. “A steel bar this thick is very likely to cause massive blood loss, which is deadly to the patient,” Sang Xiguang, chief of the operation team, told Qilu Evening News. He said it was the most difficult case of penetrating trauma he had ever encountered. It took the doctors nearly six minutes to just remove the steel bar from Zhang’s body, one centimeter after another. The most important post-surgery task is to prevent infections, said the hospital’s neurosurgeon Li Gang. And the patient must then do extensive rehabilitation exercises before recovery.