Dr Rob Carson : Household Drill Saves Boy, Medical Hero

Hero doctors save boy with household drill. Dr David Tynan, Karen Rossi, hero Dr Rob Carson and Michael Rossi.

An Australian doctor, Rob Carson has saved a 12-year-old boy using a household drill to bore into the kids skull and drain it of dangerous blood clot.

The quick thinking doctor, Rob Carson performed the procedure on Nicholas Rossi after the boy fell off his bike and hit his head in a rural area of country Victoria.

Appearing fine after smashing his head against a concrete path, the father of Nicholas 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 local 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 who saw Nicholas Rossi, David Tynan, said it quickly became obvious that if action to relieve the pressure on Nick Rossi's brain he was likely going to die.

But the small hospital surgery outside of the major Australian city of Melborne was not equipped with a drill powerful enough to pierce the boy's skull, "so we sent down to the maintenance department," David Tynan said.

Using a Dewalt drill fitted with a 9mm drill bit, Dr Rob Carson made a one centimetre hole near Nicholas’ right ear and saved his life by draining about 400ml of blood from his skull.

"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."





Via: Bendigo Advertiser