In January 2015, a routine workday inside one of South Africa’s deepest mines turned into a medical miracle few believed possible.
Daniel De Wet, an engineering supervisor, was carrying out standard maintenance deep underground when he lost his footing. He fell onto a five-foot steel crowbar. The impact was catastrophic. The metal rod entered through his groin and exited near his shoulder blade, passing through his abdomen and chest.
At nearly 3.5 kilometers below the surface, his coworkers assumed the injury was unsurvivable.
Yet De Wet was still conscious.
Emergency crews made the critical decision not to remove the metal. He was carefully extracted from the mine with the crowbar still lodged in his body and rushed to a hospital, where surgical teams prepared for an operation that would test every limit of anatomy and precision.
Doctors removed the steel rod millimeter by millimeter. The damage was severe. One kidney was destroyed, and sections of his small intestine were badly injured. But in an extraordinary twist of fate, the rod narrowly missed his heart, spine, and major arteries — by fractions of an inch.
Those millimeters made the difference.
Against all expectations, Daniel De Wet survived the surgery and the long recovery that followed. Just 19 days later, he walked out of the hospital alive.
There were no cinematic heroics and no dramatic last-second rescues. Survival came down to angles, anatomy, and chance — a brutal reminder of how thin the line between life and death can be.