Phoolbagan: A young man who had a 3.5-foot-long rod go right through his forehead and come out of the back of his skull in a car crash a month ago has recovered enough to give his surgeons the thumbs up and contemplate the odds of surviving a brain injury like this.

According to doctors, 24-year-old Mohammed Taraque would not have been alive to undergo surgery without the one-in-a-million chance of an inch-thick rod piercing the skull and not rupturing any of the main arteries of the brain.

He had been trapped in the car for an hour with the rod still attached to a median divider on VIP Road before a fire brigade team arrived to cut off that portion and move him to an ambulance. The person who was at the wheel, a friend of Taraque's, and the other passengers escaped without any injury.

"The rod passed barely 1cm above Taraque's carotid artery, which is the main supplier of blood to the brain. It passed even closer to two other branches of that artery. Had any of these been ruptured, he would have died within moments of the accident," said Binod Kumar Singhania, consultant neurosurgeon at Apollo Gleneagles Hospitals.

Singhania had led the team of doctors that operated on Taraque within an hour of him being brought to the EM Bypass hospital early on April 29.

"We had to start the emergency operation blindly, as it were, because of the unanswered questions about the exact position of the rod and the impact of the injury on the major blood vessels around it. We trod with utmost caution and the surgery was successful," Singhania recalled.

The medical team pulled out the rod from the posterior of the head before inserting an endoscope through the front to check if and how much the blood vessels were leaking. The ends of the leaking blood vessels were burnt through a process called bipolar cauterisation and a mesh-like object used to control the bleeding, Singhania said.

The surgery, which had started as a shot in the dark, went to plan. Singhania and his associates are now hoping that Taraque will recover strength and mobility with time and physiotherapy.

Taraque, who used to work in a shop, is still unable to speak - he has been advised speech therapy - but cousin Azizul said the family was grateful that he could return home on Tuesday.

This day last month, doctors in the emergency ward of the hospital had been debating how to handle two major challenges before wheeling in Taraque for surgery. The first was to intubate him - the process of inserting a breathing tube - to protect the airways.

This was difficult because the patient's head could not be tilted with the rod protruding from both sides. Getting a detailed CT scan to ascertain the exact extent of damage to the brain was also tough with the rod still inside.

"Since the brain exists in a compact space covered by the skull, a rupture and leakage of blood of more than 50ml are enough to increase intra-cranial pressure, which can lead to death," Singhania said.