Calling it one of the “rarest of rare surgeries”, Dr M C Mishra, chief of the AIIMS Trauma Centre, said: “We were astonished when he was brought to the hospital. But we planned the surgery meticulously. We had to decide how to extricate the rod which had fortunately missed his vital organs.”

On July 12, Dutta was on his way to his Gurgaon office when his driver lost control and collided with the construction barricades on the Gurgaon-Mehrauli road. The impact of the collision caused the iron rod to pierce through the dashboard and impale Dutta.

The rod remained embedded inside his body for 90 minutes before he was taken to hospital. Dutta, however, did not lose consciousness and instead called his relatives and friends on the phone. Locals cut the rod and rushed him to AIIMS. “Fortunately, they did not try to extricate the rod from Dutta’s body. Had they done that, it could have proved fatal,” a doctor at AIIMS said.

The surgery was not an easy one. “To start with, anesthesia was an issue because Dutta could not lie down, so we had to anaesthetise him in a sitting position. It was not a standard operation but fortunately we were successful,” Mishra said.