A miracle for teen impaled in mowing accident
Published: September 4, 2006
It was a billion-to-one shot.
A piece of metal about the size of a drinking straw flew out from underneath a lawn mower and rammed through Matt Collins’ navel.
The 18-year-old should have died within minutes after the projectile pierced his pancreas and abdominal aorta. The shard did not go all the way through him but did push the skin on his back about 2 inches out.
The freak accident happened Tuesday afternoon when his 20-year-old brother was cutting the lawn at his family’s house with a push lawn mower. A doctor told Collins’ father that the metal went into the artery but also helped seal off the wound to keep him from bleeding to death.
“I thought he was dead,” said Gary Collins. “God thought otherwise and decided to seal it, and he’s going to make it.”
Doctors at Halifax Medical Center in Daytona Beach removed the 10-inch piece of metal and placed Matt Collins in the intensive surgical care unit, where they kept him in a drug-induced coma Thursday in serious but stable condition. He will remain hooked up to a breathing machine until he undergoes surgery today, his father said.
“The doctor said it was a miracle, said he could’ve bled to death in one minute,” Gary Collins said. “This was a death blow. . . . God had his hand on him.”
Gary Collins, 55, said he did not know where the piece of metal came from. He said the family had mowed the lawn anywhere from 30 to 50 times with that mower without any problems. “It just probably got dropped out there or was there the whole time,” he said of the shard.
Matt had been standing about 30 feet behind his older brother, Joel, who was mowing the lawn in their backyard with a Toro Proline walk-behind model, their father said. Matt would usually mow the lawn, but Tuesday he decided to show Joel how to use the hefty red-and-black machine.
“Matt was just showing him how everything worked,” Gary Collins said as he gestured to the lawn mower parked in his driveway on Portview Avenue. “It’s just one of those accidents,” he said. “It’s one of those things that just happens.”
Nearly 80,000 Americans a year require medical treatment because of lawn-mower injuries, according to a study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. But experts say getting impaled by a projectile from a lawn mower is rare.
Nails and wire are the most common objects that turn into projectiles, said Patty Davis, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, a federal agency.
Thirty percent of injuries that come from use of a walk-behind power lawn mower come from blade contact, Davis said. Only 16 percent come from thrown objects.
People should make a habit of looking for any debris that might be on their lawns before they start to mow, she said.
“It’s a real concern for consumers,” she said. “It’s something you have to take seriously.”
There were about 48,700 injuries in emergency rooms related to walk-behind mowers from 2003 to 2005, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Objects that get struck by the blade of a lawn mower can become projectiles that can travel up to 200 mph, according to a study on lawn-mower safety by the University of Iowa.
The lawn mower owned by the Collins family is a popular model with landscape contractors and isn’t as common for homeowners, said Connie Kotke, a Toro Co. spokeswoman.
Kotke said that all of the company’s products come with manuals and labeling with detailed operating instructions and safety tips.
“Any of the products that we sell have been put through thorough safety testing,” she said.
David Seaberg, professor and chairman of the department of emergency medicine at the University of Florida in Gainesville, said he has seen other projectile injuries that come from lawn mowers, but nothing like Matt Collins’ injury.
“Normally we see projectiles that hit the leg and cause fractures,” he said. “I can’t recall one like this.”
Seaberg, who is not involved in treating Collins, said the injury could be comparable to a bullet wound.
“Anything that penetrates the abdominal aorta could lead to bleeding [to death] in a number of minutes,” he said. “It’s the main vessel that comes from the heart, and it delivers blood to all the organs.”
Gary Collins, a construction foreman, said he feels fortunate. “He ain’t out of the woods yet,” he said of his son, “but he’s doing fine.”
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