A builder is recovering after an operation to remove a 1.8m-long iron bar from his head.
The bar fell from the fifth floor of a building under construction, went through Eduardo Leite's hard hat, pierced the back of his skull and exited between his eyes.
Amazingly the 24-year-old survived and when he arrived at hospital he was conscious and able to tell doctors what had happened.
Luiz Alexandre Essinger, chief of staff of Miguel Couto hospital, Rio de Janeiro, said doctors successfully withdrew the bar during a five-hour operation on Wednesday.
"He was taken to the operating room, his skull was opened, they examined the brain and the surgeon decided to pull the metal bar out from the front in the same direction it entered the brain," Essinger said.
He said Leite was lucid and showed no negative consequences after the operation. "Today, he continues well, with few complaints for a five-hour-long surgery," Essinger said. "He says he feels little pain."
Essinger added that "it really was a miracle" Leite survived.
"They told me he was laying down (in the ambulance) with the bar pointing upward," said Leite's wife, Lilian Regina da Silva Costa. "He was holding it and his face covered in blood. His look was as if nothing had happened. When he arrived he told the doctors he wasn't feeling anything, no pain, nothing. It's unbelievable."
Ruy Monteiro, the hospital's head of neurosurgery, told the Globo TV network Leite escaped losing one eye and becoming paralysed on the left side of his body by just a few centimetres.
He said the bar entered a "non-eloquent" area of the brain that doesn't have a specific, major known function. Leite is expected to remain in hospital for at least two weeks.