This is the heart-wrenching moment Indian doctors successfully removed a four-feet long steel rod from the torso of a 33-year construction worker after it had impaled his groin and sprung out from his neck.

Doctors at the government-run Sir J J hospital in Mumbai city carried out a five-hour life saving operation on Saleem Shiekh on Friday to remove the metallic bar that had perforated his intestines, liver and thoracic cavity before coming out from his right collar bone.

Sheikh had slipped from the first floor of an under construction building and fell nine-feet down on the rods that was jetting out of a concrete pillar at a construction site in Nashik city.

His alert co-workers had used steel cutter to detach the rod from the pillar and rushed him to a hospital nearby hospital, reports the Story Trender.

But doctors at the Nashik facility were unable to perform a surgery to remove the nearly fatal foreign body from the torso and helped them shift the patient to the Mumbai hospital some 200 kilometers away in an ambulance.

Sheikh reached JJ Hospital at 2am on Friday morning. Even the most experienced members of the emergency team were taken aback by the nature of his injury. Then began the process of evaluating his injuries & deciding a surgical plan.

A team of doctors at the hospital conducted a series of tests to check the trajectory of the rod as they were planning to carry out the recovery operation but his vitals fell to critical levels, forcing them to immediately conduct an operation.

Sheikh was immediately shifted for a CT scan to assess the trajectory of the rod inside his body. However, Sheikh’s vitals started dropping probably due to ongoing internal bleeding secondary to internal organ damage.

After stabilizing his vital parameters the group of surgeons took Sheikh up for an emergency surgery, where they laparoscopically and thoracoscopically assessed the degree of damage the impaled rod had done to the internal organs. In the abdomen, the rod had pierced through not only the small intestine, but also its mesentry, attachment containing the blood vessels supplying it.

The 130 cm rod had damaged almost all vital organs in his body including his right lung, passing through the liver but had just missed the heart.

Dr Ajay Bhandarwar, who was part of the team said open and laparoscopic techniques were used in the surgery.

He said: ‘The patient was fortunate enough to have avoided injury to important structures in abdomen like urinary bladder, kidney and inferior vena cava, and the superior vena cava in the chest.

‘The patient was able to survive the accident as it narrowly missed the major vessels. The emergency team was very prompt to spring into action and started resuscitation.’

Currently, the patient has been shifted to general ward. His clinical progress has been satisfactory.