Just over a decade ago, engineering supervisor Danie de Wet, from Carletonville, lay impaled on a 1.8m-long industrial crowbar 3.5km underground after one of the most horrific mining accidents involving a single victim in South African history.
He thought he was about to meet his maker. Yet three years later he was running the Comrades Marathon. His story is a remarkable example of the triumph of hope over apparently insuperable odds.
Today the family man with three children — Danie, 15, Elandie, 19, and Danell, 20 — recalls his near-death experience on January 10 2015 with stark clarity.
“I was using the gwala [crowbar] to stir up the mud because we were washing out an underground dam,” he recalls. “I wanted to stand up on the suction pipe, which is about a metre high, and somehow I slipped.”
After his fall, and impalement, he says, “I was talking the whole time, trying to keep the other guy on the team calm”. Then he looked down and, to his ”utter disbelief”, saw that the gwala had penetrated his body, going in between his legs and exiting through his back, just below his shoulder blade.
“Because of the adrenaline rush, I had absolutely no pain at first. There was only one guy with me down there. He became very scared and didn’t know what to do. I told him to calm down and call for help on the two-way radio.”
Within minutes, a rigger crew with a first-aid pack and stretcher arrived. The rescue team carried him through knee-high muddy water for about 40m to a station area where a cage lift was waiting to hoist them to the surface. This was no mean feat as the bottom of the gwala was almost level with De Wet’s feet.
“On 34 level sub-shaft, paramedics met me and gave me morphine. I remember nothing further, until I woke up two weeks later in Netcare Milpark Hospital,” he says.
In the last 10 years he has done extremely well, running the Comrades Marathon, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he is training for the Ironman
— Prof Kenneth Boffard
Having been brought to the surface at a pace that ensured that he did not suffer any adverse decompression effects, commonly known as “the bends”, he was airlifted to hospital.
The then trauma director at Milpark’s emergency department — one of only four level 1 accredited trauma units in South Africa — Prof Kenneth Boffard received a call about the unusual case and began assembling an operating team.
Asked about his initial reaction when confronted by the sight of a person with a gwala stuck through his body, Boffard said: “I had to think of it in terms of a technical problem, to which I had to apply my mind in order to decide on the best course of treatment for the patient.
“When De Wet arrived at the hospital, we put him under anaesthetic, lying on his side. We needed to get him in a position that would enable us to operate, but with the gwala sticking through his back, it was rather awkward.”
Boffard says De Wet’s accident “presented a number of challenges, as the gwala was too long to fit in the emergency medical services helicopter, and it couldn’t be cut because that would heat up the metal rod.
“He was lying in a particular position that couldn’t be changed for surgery, among the numerous technical considerations in the first ‘golden hour’ of trauma care,” says Boffard.
Back to the present. “In the last 10 years he has done extremely well, running the Comrades Marathon, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he is training for the Ironman,” says Boffard.
There were two things, he says, that tipped the balance in De Wet’s favour. “In addition to the acute treatment for his injury in hospital, he had excellent rehabilitation, which is essential after a major trauma injury like his. Also, he had one of the most extraordinarily supportive families, especially his wife, Liezel, who was at his side every day.
De Wet said his wife had described Boffard as very calm and reassuring when she first met him at the hospital
“He reassured her that if I arrived at the hospital alive, I would go home alive,” De Wet recalls. “When he came out of surgery to brief her with the gwala in his hand, my wife says she didn’t know how to thank him.
“Everyone at Netcare Milpark Hospital who looked after me was absolutely caring. Prof Boffard and his wife also gave my wife a lot of support. We are so very grateful.”
As a gesture of gratitude, De Wet donated his framed Comrades medal to Boffard.
“The sisters at the clinic allowed my colleagues and family to come into the ICU for five minutes and pray around me. Even though I was unconscious, they told me later that the tears were rolling down my cheeks.”
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