A Florida teen is undergoing a miraculous recovery after he was accidentally shot in the head with a spear gun. Yasser Lopez, 16, was on a fishing trip with friends when the spear gun they had brought along accidentally went off, shooting the 3-foot-spear through the teen’s skull. Click below to read the rest of the story.
The spear miraculously missed all the major blood vessels in Lopez’s brain, doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital told reporters during a press conference Monday.
The spear entered the boy’s head about an inch above his right eye and went straight through the skull, doctors said.
“It’s a striking injury,” Dr. George Garcia told reporters. “It’s something you don’t see every day, a patient who arrives awake and speaking with a 3-foot-spear in his head.”
When the teen arrived at the hospital, medical staff used rebar cutters and vise grips from the Miami-Dade fire department to cut the shaft protruding from the boy’s head so that they could fit him inside a CT scan machine.
By interviewing the family, doctors learned that the stainless steel spear had an unscrewable tip, said Dr. Ross Bullock, a trauma neurosurgeon at Jackson Memorial. They were able to remove it before trying to extract the entire object from Lopez’s head.
