Construction Worker Pierces His Own Heart With Nail Gun In Wisconsin Accident

GREEN BAY, WI — A carpenter from Wisconsin has an important warning for do-it-yourselfers and other construction workers: Improperly handled, a nail gun can be a lethal weapon. It almost was for Doug Bergeson, who accidentally shot a 3-1/2-inch nail in his heart while building a home near Peshtigo.

“Ouch” probably just ran through your head. Amazingly, Bergeson said it didn’t hurt when the nail pierced his heart at the speed of a .22-caliber bullet. He even drove himself 12 miles to a hospital in Green Bay.

Bergeson was standing on his tiptoes about seven weeks ago as he finished work on a fireplace and was bringing the nail gun forward when it accidentally discharged. The gun fell to the ground and fired again, lodging a 3-1/2-inch framing nail in Bergeson's heart.

Bergeson was calm when he realized the nail pierced his heart. (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Green Bay Patch, and click here to find your local Wisconsin Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

“It didn't really hurt. It just felt like it kind of stung me,” Bergeson told WBAY-TV. “When I saw it moving with my heart, it's kind of like, I'm not going to get anything done today! I can see that already!”

Bergeson said driving himself to the hospital “seemed like the right thing to do.”

“I just leaned over the security guard and said I've got a nail in my chest. It'd be great if you can find somebody to help me out here. I'm just going to sit down,” he recalled saying.

Bergeson said that though he wasn’t in pain, he knew better than to try to pull the nail out on his own.

It’s a good thing he didn’t. If he had, the nail lodged in his heart would have been catastrophic. Doctors also said the nail came perilously close to striking a main artery — the difference was in the thickness of a piece of paper.

“Must have had somebody watching over me,” Bergeson told KRON-TV. “Because it was close.”

Dr. Alexander Roitstein, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Aurora BayCare Medical Center, where Bergeson underwent emergency surgery, told WBAY the construction worker is lucky.

“A wrong heartbeat, a wrong position and he would have had a much more complicated problem than he was bargaining for,” Roitstein said. “And so he's quite fortunate from that standpoint.”

Bergeson isn’t the only carpenter to take a nail to the heart. In 2013, Eugene Rakow, 58, of St. Bonifacius, Minnesota, said his surgeon told him that nine out of 10 people die after taking a nail in the heart.

Rakow’s accident was eerily similar to Begeson’s.

“I was leaning against a board with the gun,” Rakow told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “I had the gun at an angle, chest level, and it jumped and I still had my hand on the trigger. It impaled the nail in my chest.”

Dr. Louis B. Louis, who performed the surgery, told the Star Tribune the nail pierced Rakow’s heart from front to back, “barely missing critical structures.”

Rokow didn’t drive himself to the hospital, though. He called his wife, who took him to a local hospital, where he was transferred to a major trauma hospital in Minneapolis.

Photo via Shutterstock