He arrived in the operating room with an arrow of more than 30 centimeters that pierced the left ventricle, the most important of the heart chambers, and a lung.
A 47-year-old resident in a municipality in the Aosta belt was saved, with an intervention considered exceptional, to the Cardiac Surgeon of the Molinette hospital in the City of Health of Turin.
The operation to extract the dart and treat cardio-pulmonary lesions was perfectly successful.
The causes of the incident have yet to be clarified.
According to what has been learned, the dart was thrown by a crossbow that the man was fumbling. It was probably an accident but the hypothesis of an attempted suicide is not excluded. Transported in desperate conditions to the Aosta hospital, the 47-year-old was transferred to Molinette in Turin by helicopter with a service coordinated by the Piedmontese 118 operations center. The patient, who always remained awake before the surgery, was taken care of by the University Cardiac Surgery team directed by Professor Mauro Rinaldi who, previously alerted, conducted the life-saving operation. The immediate removal of the dart - the doctors explain - could have triggered uncontrollable bleeding. The Cardiac Surgery team established emergency extracorporeal circulation to support cardio-respiratory functions and then proceeded to extract the dart from the heart to repair the cardio-pulmonary lesions.
