Dante Autullo lives in a small town in the suburbs of Chicago. At 35, he is the father of four children and lives with his partner Gail Glaenzer. He’s a poor handyman, but that doesn’t stop him from going to the coal when necessary. Gail often tells her, mockingly, “I don’t mind marrying you as long as your face looks good for the wedding picture.” »
On Tuesday, January 17, 2012, Dante repairs the roof of a shed. Perched at the top of a ladder, he is holding his pneumatic nail gun in his hand when it slips between his fingers, hits his forehead, and falls to the ground. Dante sees 36 candles. He feels as if he’s been punched, without imagining for a second that the nailer has driven an 8 centimeter nail into his brain. He will later explain that he thought “that the nail had grazed [his] ear, that’s all”.
Observing only a scratch on the skull, his companion confines herself to disinfecting the wound. After swallowing a painkiller, Dante goes back to work. The repair completed, still feeling nothing, he clears the snow outside his house. In the evening, he accompanies his kids to a theater rehearsal. It wasn’t until the next morning that he felt nauseous. He staggers. At his wife’s insistence, he goes to Oak Lawn Hospital.
Doctors question him about his recent activities, examine the scratch and give him a skull x-ray. Stunned, they discover the presence of a long nail which, miraculously, has not crossed any vital zone. No arteries were punctured. If no pain has appeared, it is because the brain does not have nerves capable of registering pain. At first, the young man believes in a joke. “Are you kidding me? Did you find this idea in the collection of jokes for doctors? »
Immediately, Dante is transferred to a hospital in Chicago to operate. Neurosurgeon Leslie Schaffer removes two shards of bone broken during penetration of the nail, before extracting it with surgical forceps. To close the opening, he places a small titanium grille. All in all, better a nail in the skull than a bullet. The latter explodes stuffing the brain with dozens of deadly fragments, while the nail follows a straight trajectory causing no damage if no vital center is damaged.
Dante’s unhappy-happy experience is far from the only one in the world. Every year, hundreds of people are hospitalized with one or more nails in the head. The current record is held by a man who voluntarily nailed himself twelve times. And he survived happily! Others are less fortunate in dying or suffering serious sequelae. Accidents like Dante’s are rather rare, the main cause of these unfortunate gestures is suicide. But the nail gun is nowhere near as effective as the ball gun. Some prefer to shoot themselves in the heart, but again the method is not always fatal. From here to say that it is not worth a nail…
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