You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Having compressed air blown up your butt.
This sounds like a rejected story line for an episode of the Simpsons.
You know the episode where Homer inflates like a GoodYear Blimp and floats over Springfield dropping F bombs on the local school kids.
Yeah it sounds like a cartoon, but this is for real people.
DATELINE: New Zealand
It’s here that a truck driver inflated “like a balloon” when he fell buttocks-first onto a compressed air nozzle.
The human balloon is is Steven McCormack. He says he was working on his truck when he slipped between the cab and the trailer, dislodging the compressed air hose that feeds the brakes.
That’s when all hell broke loose and super charged air began filling his body like a birthday balloon at the flower mart.
According to published reports, the brass fitting that the hose had been attached to pierced McCormack’s left buttock in the fall, sending compressed air rushing into his body.
This is when the story gets real. The 48-year-old said he felt as if he was going to explode and began to scream as his neck, feet and hands swelled up.
“I was blowing up like a football … it felt like I had the bends, like in diving. I had no choice but just to lay there, blowing up like a balloon,”.
Workmates rushed to McCormack’s aid, turning off the compressed air and packing ice around his swollen neck.
Can you imagine air powerful enough to blow up a truck tire filling the layers of skin between your muscle and your bone. It’s amazing his skin didn’t shred like pulled pork on a bar b q spit.Ambulance officers removed the brass nozzle from his buttock and rushed him to Whakatane Hospital, where a surgeon treated the injury and drained one of his lungs, which had filled with fluid during the ordeal.
McCormack said doctors later told him that the air separated fat from muscle and they were surprised his skin did not burst.
Now recuperating in Whakatane Hospital, he told the Beacon his skin felt “like a pork roast,” hard and crackly on the outside but soft underneath.
A hospital spokeswoman confirmed details of the freak accident, which she said could have killed McCormack.
talk about your close calls.
And that is crazy.™