A MAN who impaled his neck with a shovel, which only just missed major nerves, has miraculously survived.
Nikolai, 47, was clearing snow on a rooftop in the Krasnoyarsk region of Russia when the shovel handle slipped and lodged in his neck.
Harrowing images show Nikolai lying in a hospital bed with the wooden handle protruding from his mouth.
The horror accident occurred in the Krasnoyarsk region of Russia.
“The victim was clearing snow from the roof of a building when he lost his grip and fell,” said maxillofacial surgeon Dr Sergey Volynkin, at Krasnoyarsk Regional Clinical Hospital.
After the terrifying accident, his family quickly called an ambulance.
Nikolai was taken to the hospital in critical condition, local reports said.
The handle was “dangerously close to major blood vessels and nerves”, leading to a complex surgery which took around an hour.
But doctors managed to safely remove the shovel from his neck.
A hospital spokesman confirmed, “the patient is currently recovering”.
They added: “His life is not in danger.”
After waking up from the operation, Nikolai “thanked the surgeon for saving his life”.
This comes after doctors were force to pull a motorcycle brake handle from a teenager’s eye after it got stuck during a horror road accident.
The boy, 19, escaped with no major injuries or lasting sight problemsdocs said.
Sharing gory details and pictures of the freak accident in a journal, medics in Malaysia revealed how the lever missed his eyeball by just millimetres.
Firefighters were said to have cut the brake handle from the bike at the scene of the crash so that paramedics could get to him.
Upon arrival at the Universiti Malaya Eye Research Centre in Kuala Lumpur, the man’s eye was red and swollen.
The bike handle was awkwardly protruding from his right eye socket, slightly to the left of his eyeball.
CT scans revealed the handle had pierced the lower eye socket and damaged part of the bone around his nose.
The 17cm handle had luckily missed his pupil and nerves, which meant he narrowly escaped long-term eye damage.
The teen was rushed to surgery, where the handle was removed from his eye along with the damaged tissue.
The broken bone around his nose was then rebuilt with two screws.