WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES BELOW

A painter in India who fell off a ladder and landed on a bamboo pole is lucky to be alive after surgeons worked for hours to remove it safely from his chest. The man, identified as 38-year-old Panchanana Pradhan, was reportedly seven feet in the air on June 2 when one of the bamboo ladder’s rungs gave way, SWNS reported.

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He fell and landed on his side on a 2-foot-long shard of bamboo, which according to surgeons pierced through his skin on an angle upward into his chest just inches away from his heart. Pradhan was rushed to a hospital and was then transferred to a larger facility 170 miles away in Cuttack, according to SWNS.

The man was seven feet high when one of the ladder rungs snapped. 

The man was seven feet high when one of the ladder rungs snapped.  (SWNS)

“The patient was having breathlessness and pain in the abdomen," Dr. Srikanta Panda, Pradhan’s surgeon at Srirama Chandra Bhanja Medical College and Hospital, told SWNS. “He was operated under general anesthesia. After opening the abdomen almost a liter of blood bled out and the bamboo stick was found.”

An X-ray shows the bamboo's trajectory after it pierced his skin and traveled upward through his chest.

An X-ray shows the bamboo's trajectory after it pierced his skin and traveled upward through his chest. (SWNS)

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According to Panda, his patient’s stomach was cut by an iron nail that was sticking out from the bamboo.

Pradhan is expected to be "discharged soon." 

Pradhan is expected to be "discharged soon."  (SWNS)

“The bamboo stick was extracted gently with precision,” he said, according to SWNS.

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Pradhan remains hospitalized but is expected to be “discharged soon.”

It took surgeons several hours to remove the bamboo spike, which was just inches from his heart.

It took surgeons several hours to remove the bamboo spike, which was just inches from his heart. (SWNS)

Last month, surgeons at another hospital in Uttar Pradesh, India, miraculously saved a motorist who was impaled by a 2.5-foot-long iron spike when he collided with a pickup truck. That patient, identified only as Narendra, had the spike, which went through the right side of his chest and out his upper back, removed in a three-hour surgery.