8-Year-Old Survives Being Impaled On Tire Iron

FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) - Toby Marmon, 8, doesn't realize how lucky he is.  "It's truly a miracle," said his father Matthew Marmon.

When you see his x-rays you may agree.

"This ranks up there for sure in the top injuries I've seen in my career," said Cook Children's Pediatric Surgeon Dr. Chip Uffman, "I think it very much could be a miracle, if the location of the injury had been anywhere different the story could be different."

The eight-year-old boy from Springtown was playing outside with his three brothers Monday night, while his mother Jennifer Marmon was cooking dinner.  "My oldest came running saying 'Mom, Mom, brother's got something in him, come now!'" she explained. "It just happened so fast and so quick."

Toby had been impaled.

"He was climbing a tree," his father explained, "and my youngest son Colton, he was just walking with this piece of pipe and Toby fell out of the tree at the same time he walked underneath him."

The metal rod used on a car jack went 17 inches inside Toby's body. He had to be flown to Cook Children's in Fort Worth for emergency surgery.

"We're looking with our own eyes and thinking it's not that far in him, it couldn't be," his mother said, "and then we get here [to the hospital] and we find it's worse than what we thought."

"When I saw Toby the bar was sticking out of his groin," said Dr. Uffman who operated on the boy, "and you could feel it as it went through the abdomen until it went deep enough that you could not any longer."

Chest x-rays show the pipe clear up into Toby's chest, but amazingly his only injuries were small lacerations on his liver and diaphragm.

"If this was over just a little bit," Dr. Uffman said referencing the metal rod in the x-rays, "it would have injured his major blood vessels to his liver, if it had been on the left side it would have injured the heart or the spleen."

Both scenarios could have been fatal, Dr. Uffman said, but just four days after he was impaled, Toby left the hospital.

"I'm just counting my blessings, I'm so thankful," his mother said. "Wow, words cannot describe how wonderful I feel, because I just love him and I just don't know what I would do."

"This totally blew me away," his father added, "I just thank God he's still here."