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What was in his head? A 3.25" nail from a nail gun.
Wow, lucky guy.
Are hard hats hard enough to prevent nails from penetrating them? I don’t work in construction, so it’s an honest question.
Not if you were to press the nailgun onto the hard hat and then pull the trigger, no. But in normal use it would likely slow or deflect the nail enough that all 3.25" wouldn’t have been embedded in his brain like that.
Nailguns are dangerous. I’ve personally seen 2 people shoot their hands with them.* Safety goggles and a hardhat are just a good idea when working with any type of power/pneumatic/hydraulic tool.
*Curiously (perhaps) the most common tool injury IME comes from screwdrivers. And some of those are just as debilitating as shooting a nail through your hand with a nailgun.
Good thing the hospital thought to take a plain x-ray first, rather than jump right to an MRI, where the magnetic field would most likely drag the nail through his brain in a sub-optimal fashion.
I don’t know if a typical plastic “bump cap” would completely prevent a large nail from penetrating and going into a skull. My hunch is that he would have wound up with the cap nailed to his head. It certainly would have been a more obvious injury at that moment.
A coworker of mine was using a nail gun at home and stopped to remark “If I were doing this at work, I’d have to wear safety glasses and a hard hat. I hate those freaking things!”
Yep, the very next nail fractured and a 2 inch metal splinter went into his eye. Luckily for him, it missed all the important stuff and he can still see, but damn, that was stupid.
Vlad the Impaler could have made good use of this tool. Maybe he actually had one!
I just can’t picture how he managed to nail his head from behind like that, luckily he didn’t hit any vital organs… 
Yeah, all those annoying safety professionals and rules forcing people to not hurt or kill themselves. 
For real! I don’t even know why they still make flathead (slotted) screws anymore! It’s frickin ridiculous because the screwdriver almost always comes slipping out of the head of the screw while you’re tightening it.
When I was a kid, I got an awesome miniature kid-sized hard hat, during a tour of a quarry.
of course. So would I. This comes up often in this kind of injury, but I never hear if he gets it.
Why not, I wonder. It’s his property. I know from tv (tv doesn’t lie) that some doctors keep trophys.
Maybe I’ll ask about the legalities in GQ.
Piece (of mind)
mangeorge
My husband was able to keep his massive gallstone from his gall bladder removal surgery - they don’t normally do that, but they made an exception in his case (it really is a massive stone - think black olive sized).
Years ago I used to go with my two-year-old to watch some houses being built. The bulldozer was a few hundred yards away, but my son always insisted on wearing his little Bob the Builder hat, to stay safe.