One man, one lawnmower, one airborne golf club shaft to the face.
It sounds like a cartoon—but it walked into my ER one quiet night. Welcome to small-town emergency medicine, where the weird doesn’t clock in, it just shows up.
Some stories get burned into your brain by sheer absurdity.
This one goes back many years—so forgive me if a few of the details are fuzzy. I was well out of residency by then, working full-time in private practice, but like many young docs trying to make ends meet, I picked up moonlighting shifts in small-town ERs.
One night, I was covering a quiet little hospital—not much going on. Just me, a nurse, and whatever chaos the world decided to throw our way. I was minding my business, maybe catching up on charts or daydreaming about sleep, when I heard a commotion out front.
I stood up, poked my head out of the ER door… and froze.
There, standing in front of me, was a man—with a golf club shaft sticking out of his face.
Let me say that again.
A golf club shaft. In his face.
I couldn’t move. My brain was desperately trying to process what I was seeing. This wasn’t some Halloween prank. It was real. Somehow, the shaft of a club—still mostly intact—was jutting from just below his left cheekbone. It had entered beneath the zygomatic arch and traveled upward toward just under his eye. Three, maybe four inches deep.
Shock wore off quick. Training kicked in.
One of the cardinal rules of emergency medicine: do not remove impaled objects in the field. They may be tamponading a major vessel or holding a shattered structure together. Pulling them out without control can turn a bad day into a catastrophic one. So the first order of business was figuring out how to stabilize the shaft until we could safely transfer him. Penetrating trauma is always fun.
But before I could even rig a dressing, he moved.
And the club fell out.
I froze again. He didn’t scream. He didn’t collapse. And somehow—miraculously—there was no major bleeding. I expected damage to the facial nerve or one of the branches of the trigeminal nerve. But somehow, he’d missed everything important. A matter of millimeters saved his eye, his face, maybe even his life.
We dressed the wound and arranged transfer to a trauma center with plastic surgery on standby. I sent him on his way—shaken, bleeding, but remarkably intact.
So how exactly does a golf club shaft end up embedded in someone’s face?
Well, he’d been mowing his lawn. Overgrown grass. Didn’t see the club lying there. The mower blade hit it, launching it like a missile into a nearby brick wall. It ricocheted. Then rebounded straight back—right into his face.
A perfect storm of physics, bad luck, and wild luck all rolled into one.
chool?
I’ll never forget it. Not just because it was bizarre—but because it’s a reminder: trauma doesn’t just happen in big-city ERs. It happens when you least expect it. Even in a sleepy town, on a quiet shift, with nothing but you, a nurse, and a stack of half-finished charts.
So keep your eyes open. And maybe—just maybe—pick up the yard before you mow.
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This story unlocked a new fear I didn’t even know I had!! Luckily, I don’t do much yard work.