Leroy Luetscher, the 86-year-old man who was impaled on a pair of pruning shears last month, said he'd "never had pain like this in my life."
The Green Valley, Ariz., man dropped the shears while working in his yard, and as he bent down to pick them up he lost his balance and fell face-down onto them. The handle of the shears entered in through his eye socket and down into his neck, missing his carotid artery, TODAY reported.
"That could have just cut my artery right there, and i could have bled to death right there, on the spot," Luetscher said at a press conference.
He went back into his house, where his longtime girlfriend, Arpy Williams, saw him.
"I saw this instrument in his face, and I just said, Leroy, honey, what have you done?" Williams said at the press conference.
Luetscher's doctor, Dr. Lynn Polonski, who also treated Rep. Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot in the head this past winter, said that he'd seen impalements from branches, nails and glass before. But he'd never seen an impalement from pruning shears -- until Luetscher.
Now that the shears have been successfully removed, Luetscher can see fine out of his affected eye -- though he does have some double vision, that doctors hope will go away soon, TODAY reported.
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