Watch: Surgeons remove live grenade from Colombian soldier’s face

Watch as surgeons remove a live grenade from a Colombian soldier‘s face. The doctors performed the unusual surgery  in a make-shift operating room in order to save the life of the 20 year old Colombian soldier and prevent any additional casualties in case the grenade detonated in the hospital. The grenade lodged in his cheek after the soldier accidentally fired the grenade launcher while on a patrol. Fusion reported,

According to the military, Luna was injured when a fellow soldier accidentally fired a grenade launcher during a patrol of Colombia’s eastern plains. The grenade hit Luna on the right side of his face, knocking out some of his teeth and lodging into his crushed cheek bones. But the grenade didn’t explode, apparently because M-40s are designed to detonate about 45 feet from their launch site.

The accident was just the beginning of Luna’s bizarre ordeal. The army couldn’t airlift him out of the area out of fear that the movement of the helicopter would detonate the grenade in mid-flight. Hospitals in the immediate area did not have adequate equipment to perform the risky operation, so Luna had to be packed into a vehicle for a long, white-knuckle drive to Colombia’s capital city.

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When Luna arrived in Bogota, doctors immediately set up an improvised “operating room” in the hospital parking lot, to avoid putting other patients’ and doctors’ lives at risk.

“I thought about calling my wife and my 21-year-old son to tell them what I was about to do, but I decided not to,” Doctor Sanchez told El Tiempo. “They may have tried to convince me not to do it, and I couldn’t afford to have any doubts entering that delicate scenario.”

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5o0qek_kes

Image courtesy of Fusion