This is the X-Ray of a Man Who Shot Himself in the Neck With a Nail Gun

A Massachusetts carpenter is lucky to be alive after he accidentally shot himself in the neck with a nail gun working at a construction site.

The 3 1/2 nail entered the top of Patrick Matheson’s chest at a speed of 1,400 feet per second on Dec. 1, the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror reported. It pierced his trachea and esophagus, then embedded in his vertebral column.

“I couldn’t shout, but I knew I wasn’t dead,” Matheson told the newspaper. “I got down off the ladder, trying to move slow and not move my neck too much.”

Still conscious, he waited for an ambulance to arrive. Doctors later determined that had the nail entered his chest a millimeter to the right, Matheson likely would have bled to death at the site. If the nail had been an inch longer, it would have pierced his spinal cord, leaving him a paraplegic, the newspaper reported.