Man impaled on shears

AN 86-year-old man has spoken of how he amazingly cheated death after being impaled through the eye by a pair of pruning shears.

Leroy Luetscher, of Phoenix, Arizona, had just finished trimming plants in his back garden when he fell face-first into the shears, sending one of the handles through his right eye socket and halfway into his head.

“I didn’t know if my eyeball was still there or what,” he said. “The pain was so bad that I guess I wasn’t afraid to die.”

Luetscher managed to put his T-shirt over the wound to stanch the bleeding. He said the excruciating pain was what kept him conscious. His live-in girlfriend called emergency services.

The handle had gone 6ins into his head and was resting against the carotid artery in his neck.

Surgeons made incisions underneath his right upper lip and his sinus wall, allowing them to loosen the handle of the shears with their fingers and were able to remove it.