By Bob Fowler
Knoxville News-Sentinel
CLINTON, Tenn. — Cathy Smith’s world forever turned upside down three years ago.
That’s when Smith, a Clinton resident at the time, fell off a ladder and landed face-first on a garden shepherd’s hook. The curved end of the steel hook pierced her head just below her right eye and went deep into her brain.
That bizarre accident, her rescue and surgery and her long road to recovery - still a journey in progress - are the subject of a television documentary titled “I Was Impaled.”
It’ll air 10 p.m. Saturday on the Discovery Fit & Health Network.
“It’s something you never in your life would think would happen,” Smith said of the mishap. “It’s life-altering.”
Now a resident of the tiny Church Hill community near Kingsport, Smith, 55, said filming the re-enactment last spring brought back harrowing memories.
“It was very nerve-wracking reliving the whole thing,” she said.
The accident occurred July 27, 2009.
Smith, the rescuers who came to her aid and at University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, and the surgeon who extracted the hook vividly remember that day.
Because the injury was believed the first of its kind, it even prompted an article in the Journal of Surgical Case Reports.
Here’s what happened:
Smith was on a two-step ladder next to her Willow Run apartment hanging a wind chime on a small hook when she fell forward.
She landed on the shepherd’s hook, which was planted into the ground next to her deck and used to hold plants.
The hook went under her right eyeball and up behind it, into her head.
“I didn’t freak out,” Smith said. “I don’t know how I kept my cool.
“I stood there with my two hands on the ground, my fanny up in the air, hollering for help.
“Nobody came.”
Smith said she “pulled the whole pole out of the ground with the hook still in my eye,” walked to a neighbor’s apartment, and asked her to call 911.
“When the (emergency medical technicians) came, their mouths just dropped open.”
Bobbi Jo Henderson, who was assistant chief of Anderson County’s Emergency Medical Services at the time, said Smith was “a pretty calm person.""It was pretty amazing,” he said.
Henderson said Smith was secured in an ambulance, and blankets were padded between her abdomen and the 5-foot-long shepherd’s hook pole.
A medical helicopter was summoned. “We were very afraid bumps would possibly cause more damage if we transported her by ambulance,” Henderson said.
Once at UT Medical Center, trauma surgeon Dr. Todd Nickloes took over.
“I’d never seen anything like that before, and I was quite amazed that she was as alert and calm as she was,” he said.
Smith was wheeled out on a stretcher to the hospital’s ambulance bay, where Nickloes stabilized the hook while members of the Knoxville Volunteer Emergency Rescue Squad used a special saw to cut most of the steel pole free.
Back in surgery, Nickloes took the direct route to remove the hook: “I basically just rotated the thing out of her head,” he said, comparing it to removing an embedded fish hook.
He estimated the hook had burrowed as much as 6 inches into her skull and 2 to 3 inches into the frontal lobe of her brain.
Initial tests showed minimal injuries, he said. “I was amazed something that size could penetrate that far and not cause any damage,” Nickloes said.
Today, Smith says she’s on disability, and her right eye “points straight up to the heavens.” She doesn’t have any depth perception, she said, and she’s put frosted tape over her right eyeglass lens.
Said Smith: “I tell people if you’ve got a shepherd’s hook, please get rid of it.”
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