Freak accident: Man fills up like balloon

Steven McCormack thought his body was going to explode as air from a brake hose which had punctured his skin filled his body "like a balloon".
The Opotiki man was in excruciating pain as 120 pounds per square inch of air pressure was forced into his body in a freak accident on Saturday. After recovering Whakatane Hospital, he's counting himself lucky to be alive.
Mr McCormack slipped while tidying the back of the Waiotahi Contractors truck he drives and fell between the wheel and air reservoir. As he fell he broke off the hose connected to the reservoir that powers the brakes and it punctured the skin of his buttock.
"I could see myself expanding," Mr McCormack told The Daily Post yesterday.
"I was blowing up like a balloon and changing colour and I was screaming in agony. It felt like the pressure was going to explode out my foot. I was lying on the back of the truck and my lungs were filled with air and liquid, one eye had swollen shut and my body was huge."
Mr McCormack is an experienced diver and likened the feeling to having the bends although he said this was a lot more excruciating. "I'm your average hard-working Kiwi bloke, maybe a bit more simple than most, but the pain I was experiencing almost reduced me to tears."
He later learned the injuries to some of his internal organs were similar to crush injuries.
Mr McCormack's colleagues, company co-owner Robbie Petersen, Jason Wenham and Ross Hustler heard his screams and came to his aid. They tried to lift him down from where he was wedged.
"Robbie turned the air off and then they tried to lift me down from where I was but I knew I had to go up first."
Once the men had him up from where he had initially fallen, Mr Wenham put him in the recovery position. "I really, truly believe Jason saved my life when he did that."
Following a 30-minute wait for an ambulance, Mr McCormack was taken to Whakatane Hospital. He was two to three times his normal size and spent four days in the intensive care unit before being discharged yesterday.
"My partner and I live on a lifestyle block in the Waioeka Gorge," Mr McCormack said. "We have no power or phone so she didn't know anything had happened to me until later in the day. When she got to Whakatane Hospital she didn't recognise me because I was so swollen."
He said he spent four days burping and passing wind to expel air. "I did all the things you're not supposed to do in front of other people."
Whakatane St John Ambulance operations team manager Michelle Sattler, who was first on the scene, was at Whakatane Hospital when Mr McCormack was discharged. She told him she was thrilled about how different he looked.
"When you came in here you would have been three times the size you are now," Ms Sattler said.
She described the incident as one she had never dealt with before and one she was probably never likely to again.
"It's certainly not something you would expect to see in a medical text book."
Mr McCormack said he was looking forward to spending time with his cows, pigs and chooks before returning to driving trucks in a couple of weeks.
"This is something you would not even dream of happening but it happened to me and I'm grateful to be alive and walking."