“Well this is going to be a wasted day.”
That was one of the first thoughts to go through Doug Bergeson’s head on June 25 as he looked down to see a 3.5-inch framing nail stuck in his chest. As the Peshtigo, Wisc. resident would later find out, that nail was plunged a half-inch into his heart and missed hitting a major artery by the thickness of a sheet of paper.
But Bergeson, 52, who broke ground on a new home for he and his wife in 2015, didn’t know that at the time.
While working alone in his home on that Sunday morning, he lifted the nail gun he was using to reinforce the mantle area. The nail gun hit a 2×4 and fired two nails, one of which ricocheted off another piece of wood and struck Bergeson in the chest.
Initially, Bergeson, who is not a professional builder but has carpentry experience, didn’t realize what had happened. “I didn’t even realize it was in my chest,” he told BUILDER in an interview Friday. “Of course I felt it hit me but it didn’t feel piercing or anything, it felt like it nicked me. I looked down and I didn’t see anything so I took my hand and pulled my shirt tight and all of the sudden I felt the nail and then I saw it.
“’Oh, this isn’t good,’” he thought.
He sat the nail gun down and examined his chest. “I could see it was moving with my heartbeat,” he said of the nail. He didn’t feel any pressure and saw no blood, so he washed up and took a minute to assess his options.
Call an ambulance or drive to the emergency room?
He went with the latter.
The paramedics, he says, would take about 20-30 minutes to get to his house whereas he could drive himself directly to the hospital in 15 minutes.
“I hate to bother people unnecessarily,” he adds. “I know the rescue squad is there for that reason but I don’t like to depend on other people if I don’t have to. That’s why I’m building (the home) myself.”
He drove to the hospital without running so much as a stop sign and parked in a legal parking space. By the time he pulled up to the hospital, though, the adrenaline had worn off and the pain was starting to set in.
Since someone was already being helped at the reception desk, he waited a few minutes and then told a security guard about his situation. Within a minute he was being tended to.
All the while, though, he hadn’t told his wife, Donna, who was at church. He texted her from a hospital gurney to quickly explain where he was and to ask her to bring him a new shirt, since his had to be cut off. But his phone autocorrected “ER” to “we” and Donna wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Finally, a phone call sorted things out.
She entered the emergency room a short time later to see Bergeson lying in bed with a large nail in his chest. “What did you do?” Bergeson’s reply: “Oops.”
He was taken to Green Bay for heart surgery and spent two days in the hospital. Miraculously, Bergeson is fine and is even back to work on his home, though he’s more careful with the nail gun.
One of his sons recently started working as a financial planner and is now licensed to sell insurance. Bergeson, who was in need of an updated life insurance policy, was his first customer.
