Man in critical condition after folding chair collapsed and pipe impaled his anus

A Japanese man was left fighting for his life when his chair collapsed and he was impaled by a metal pipe.

The 51-year-old was sitting on a folding chair at home when it crumbled, causing him to land on a stiff pipe that entered his anus.

He lay bleeding on the bathroom floor for an hour after being hung from a pole before a family member found him and called an ambulance. He was in shock when paramedics arrived, having lost a significant amount of blood.

At the hospital, doctors performed a series of scans to determine the extent of the damage, especially to the iliac vein and artery – the main blood vessels that supply blood to the lower body.

They cut into the man’s abdomen to better assess the damage and found no active bleeding. In addition, a collection of blood that had formed there – called a hematoma – had not increased in size, indicating that the bleeding was under control.

The impaled pipe narrowly avoided a potentially catastrophic injury to a nearby artery that would have led to high-pressure bleeding if punctured.

The doctors’ report on the case did not say whether the man arrived at the hospital with the foreign object still inside him that doctors had to remove or whether it had come out on its own at home.

While the man recovered well from his hospital stay, a day after discharge he developed swelling in his leg, a sign of a blood clot there, and also of a blood clot that had traveled to his lungs.

The blue arrow points to a hematoma, or blood collection, around the iliac vein, which helped control bleeding after the man was impaled by a pipe

The man’s injury was much milder than it could have been if the pipe had punctured the iliac artery, which would have led to rapid internal bleeding.

Instead, the pipe punctured the man’s right iliac artery – which proves fatal in 25 to 80 percent of cases – but narrowly missed the artery due to the specific angle of the pipe as it entered the man’s body.

After determining that the pipe had not damaged the artery, while noting the damage to the man’s rectum, doctors performed a colostomy — a procedure that creates an opening in the abdomen through which the colon can pass waste.

He was in hospital for eleven days and his condition slowly improved. Gradually he was able to walk and eat solid food again.

The doctors allowed him to go home.

But four days later the man knew something was wrong.

His right leg started to swell so much that he decided he needed to go to the hospital and was admitted three days later.

At that point, doctors performed a CT scan that revealed a blood clot in the right iliac vein, along with a pulmonary embolism (PE), a blood clot that traveled to the lungs.

On this CT scan, after the patient was discharged for the first time, doctors found a blood clot in the left iliac artery, marked by the blue arrow. They also found a blood clot that had traveled to the man’s lungs

The doctors gave him an IV version of a common blood thinner for a day, which would prevent additional clotting.

The next day, investigators said, the patient wanted to go home, “citing an inability to tolerate the hospital environment.”

Doctors agreed and sent the man home with a blood thinner to take by mouth every day, promising to return for regular follow-up appointments, according to the report published in the newspaper American Journal of Case Reports.

“Since then, the patient has attended regular outpatient follow-up appointments without recurrence of lower extremity swelling and has returned to driving without any problems,” they said.

Regular checks of blood markers showed no signs of recurrence of the blood clot (DVT) or pulmonary embolism (PE).