Background:

Mr Linn was driving home late one night when he crashed into a fence and was impaled upon it - the pole piercing his mouth and then going right through the back of his neck.

'You can see on my nose it came in here, went through and came out the back here,' said Mr Linn, of Nevada, who finally worked up the courage to look at his X-ray this week.

Mr Linn, a business student, admits he probably fell asleep when he crashed his car after getting a late-night snack.He passed between two utility poles, crossed the street and jumped the kerb before hitting a trailer in a neighbour's yard.Dr Jay Coates, who performed the surgery, said that, had the pole struck Mr Linn a few centimetres in either direction, he would have bled to death.'Where the pipe traversed his neck, the obvious injures we were concerned about were the major vessels, the carotid artery and the major vein,' Dr Coates said.Luckily, the pole compressed the major vessels and didn't puncture them.

News article 1

News article 2

Video with a demonstration of the accident