A 42-year-old man, a farmer from a rural area, slipped while working on his property and fell directly onto a farm rake. The metal tines became embedded in his skull after the impact.
What appeared to be an imminent tragedy took another turn as soon as he arrived at the hospital: he came in conscious, oriented to time and place, with stable vital signs and no detectable neurological deficit. Doctors immediately took an X-ray to determine how deeply the object had penetrated and which structures it had missed.
The image revealed a trajectory that left the entire team surprised: the tool had passed through tissue and bone without affecting the areas that are usually lethal in this type of accident. A margin of centimeters separated an ordinary fall in the field from a completely different outcome.
