Let's use these as a reminder to always handle a speargun carefully and avoid a spearfishing accident.
QuoteDisplay MoreA teenager who cheated death after he was shot in the head with a three-foot fishing spear is learning how to walk again.
Yasser Lopez is amazing doctors by making a speedy recovery nearly three months after the accident which almost claimed his life.
It was in June earlier this year that 16-year-old Yasser and a friend was swimming in a lake near their home in Miami-Dade, Florida.
The boys were preparing the gas-powered spear gun to hunt for fish in the lake when it suddenly fired.
The three foot long spear pierced Yasser’s head an inch above his eye and when through the back of his skull.
‘I could see the spear. It was bothering me on the back, like it was scratching the floor.
'I could feel it inside my head, so I wanted to take it out,’ Yasser Lopez told Today News.
The first person by his side was witness Astrid Cardoza who urged Yasser not to touch the spear.
‘I just held his hand and I said you can't pull the spear out,’ she told Today News.
‘And he told me “please don't let me die” And I said you're not going to die.’
In a very emotional reunion at the lake, Yasser broke into tears as he thanked his guarding angel Astrid Cardoza and hugged her from his wheelchair.
‘It bothers me to come over here,’ he said. ‘I was almost dead in these waters for a simple fishing trip.’
When medics arrived at the scene, Yasser was conscious and scared.
He was flown by helicopter to Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he began flailing his arms and shouting out in Spanish.
To prevent him from causing any further damage to himself, he was chemically paralysed as doctors debated how to proceed.
'It’s a miracle the spear missed all the main blood vessels of the brain,' neurosurgeon Ross Bullock told NBC Miami after surgery.
'The most important thing is to resist that temptation to pull that thing out.'
Instead, they drafted in supplies from the Miami-Dade fire department, using rebar cutters and vise-gripes to stabilise the spear as they figured out how to take it out.
They removed 18 inches of the object before taking the X-ray. Surgeons then spent three hours taking out the spear from Yasser’s head.
When he woke from his incident doctors were amazed at his quick recovery.
Yasser says he remembers waking up dazed and confused and hitting the bed with his legs in panic until his father told him what had happened..
During a news conference held by doctors from the hospital and the Army Trauma Training Center after the surgery, Dr Bullock said: 'The amazing thing is the boy is able to speak a little now.
'He is saying short sentences a few words short sentences.'
Today Yasser has no problem speaking, he can walk very short distances and uses a wheelchair to get around.
He is already thinking about fishing but said that spearfishing may not be his first choice of method.
‘If I do ever spear fish again, very safely and with a grown up near me’
