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A small-town Australian doctor used a household drill to release a blood clot from the brain of a boy following a bicycle accident in what was hailed Wednesday as an act of extreme bravery and skill.
Nick Rossi, 13, began bleeding on the brain after hitting his head on concrete in a fall from his bicycle last Friday in the town of Maryborough, northwest of Melbourne, his father, Michael, said.
Though he seemed fine, Rossi said his wife, Karen, decided to take their son to the hospital after she discovered a lump behind his ear.
"From there he just started to deteriorate," Rossi told state radio.
"He started to pass in and out of consciousness to the point where they actually had to put a breathing apparatus on him to make him breathe, and that's where the two local GPs turned the emergency room into an operating theatre."
One of the doctors, David Tynan, said it fast became apparent that if they didn't act to relieve the pressure on Nick's brain he was going to die.
But the small hospital surgery was not equipped with a drill powerful enough to pierce the boy's skull, "so we sent down to the maintenance department," Tynan said.
"Under (telephone) instructions from ... a neurosurgeon in Melbourne we made an incision in his scalp down to the bone and then drilled through it with a drill," he said.
"It's pretty scary, you obviously worry you're ... pushing too hard but then when some blood came out after we'd gone through the skull we realised we'd made the right decision," he added.
Rossi said Rob Carson, the doctor who performed the drilling, had told him they had just "one shot" at saving his son, and Nick's neurosurgeon had told him the gutsy act had meant the difference between life and death.
"He later told me that what Dr Carson did was extremely brave," Rossi said.
"To have done that with a household drill ... he said it was unbelievable."
A draining tube was inserted into Nick's head to allow the blood to escape, and he received a transfusion of fresh blood in his arm.
Rossi said he was then airlifted to Melbourne where he made a full recovery and was released from hospital Tuesday -- his 13th birthday.
