A man is lucky to be alive after shooting a nail into his heart, according to doctors in Minnesota. Eugene Rakow got nailed, and lived to tell his story.
On Friday, Rakow, 58, was occupied with building a deck for a neighbor when he accidentally shot a 3 and one half-inch nail into his chest.
"I was leaning against a board with the gun," Rakow said.
"It had the gun at an angle, pointing to my chest, when it jumped and I still had my hand on the trigger. the nail shot straight into my chest,” he said.
Although Rakow said the nail did not hurt "that bad" at first, he knew that things were not looking good when he could feel it crunch.
Dr. Louis Louis, a heart surgeon at Abbott Northwestern Hospital, tried Rakow. He said if the nail had penetrated two millimeters more it would have hit his coronary artery. Rakow would have died on the spot.
"The sternum was behaving like a 2x4. It caught the nail and prevented it from going deeper," Louis said.
"Once we were able to get a hold of it, we were able to remove it very carefully, and then, it was a simple two stitches to repair the damage to the heart," he said.
Surprisingly, Rakow was well enough to leave the hospital on Monday to celebrate the 20th birthday of his daughter, Laura, with his wife, Carmen, and six children. He kept the nail along with an appreciation of how lucky he is.
"The surgeon said that most people would die in such a situation," Rakow said. "Nine out of ten people do not live through this," he said.
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