Did no one else read the story? I read it and it sounds moreso the clinic’s fault
The necklace he was wearing was a steel weighted exercise band, not a normal necklace. He’s not flexing his wealth or anything
His wife told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table. She said she called out to him.
Seems like the technician was told by the wife to bring her husband in to help her up. The technician/clinic made a mistake by letting in the husband, who didn’t seem properly warned about MRIs no metal policy. The technician also somehow didn’t catch the giant “necklace” he’d be wearing.
The “he wasn’t supposed to be there” seems like a coverup for their mistake, since how else would he have known to go in? Someone must’ve told him to walk into the room, it’s not like he could hear through the door.
Edit: 100% the technicians fault, the technician saw it. It even had a metal padlock.
They’d even discussed his training and the hard-to-miss chain with the MRI technician during their previous appointments, Jones-McAllister said.
“That was not the first time that guy has seen that chain” on her husband, she said. “They had a conversation about it before.”I’m not saying it’s the husband’s fault, but I don’t think it’s 100% on the technician either.
I read it more like she asked the technician to get her husband and called out to her husband who presumably just walked in.
Also, “they discussed the chain on a previous visit” doesn’t really change anything. Depending on how many people that technician sees and when that last visit was, they might’ve just forgotten.
When McAllister entered the exam room with the technician, the machine suddenly “switched him around, and pulled him in,” Jones-McAllister said.
This was part of the other article I linked. It’s a lot of “they said she said” but I’m gonna put more faith in the victim’s word and not the clinic’s.
Thank the gods for you. I was reading these comments thinking I was insane.
Why even wear the stupid necklace when going to the MRI in the first place? Like, how thoughtless and selfish can you be? Always assume you are surrounded by barely-functional morons, especially in the medical field which seems to attract these types of people, and think defensively.
“Geez, I’m going to be near an MRI machine, maybe I’ll wear a 20 pound piece of steel around my neck? Genius! Let’s do it!”
That’s an extremely privileged take. Not everyone knows about what an MRI does. Don’t just judge someone’s education and circumstance like that.
Common sense is that a person should be able to trust the medical professional. If the professional doesn’t properly warn them, how would they know?
It’s in almost every medical drama. It’s also explained to you by the personnel.
Privileged is walking around with 20 pounds of shit strapped around your neck and expecting the world to yield to you.
Again you make an assumption that people should automatically know about an MRI. I’m privileged enough to know because I love watching medical video essays and have the free time and access to do so. Not everyone has access to the same resources as you and I. Some people didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. Some people had no easy access to the internet when growing up. Some people don’t have time because they’re working 3 jobs to survive.
I’m not going to insult someone because they don’t know about x thing, because education is meant to be for helping others, not belittling anyone you meet just because you know more than them. Your first instinct shouldn’t be to ridicule a deceased person for not knowing as much as you.
Put into example it’s for a newfound medical examination that both you and I have no knowledge about. You trust the professional treating you that they know what they’re doing. A clinic isn’t going to assume you know every little detail about this. That’s the job of the clinic and their technician.
You also conveniently ignore that the technician was with the said person when he entered the room, aka he trusted the technician that he wasn’t doing something wrong. It’s not a case of he’s not allowed to be there and just so happened to trespass in with metal. He TRUSTED the professional here that he was allowed in and that there wouldn’t be any issues. The technician failed by not making sure he didn’t have anything metal. They should’ve thoroughly checked and even double checked before letting him in.
Knowledge about how many things work in the society you live in isn’t privilege, it’s fucking common sense.
Also, walking around with a 20 pound fucking necklace is stupid, and especially so if you’re doing something else at the time.
“He TRUSTED the professional”
Do you just give gas when the light turns green?
I… want to see that 9 kg necklace. I mean, sounds like it’s just a big-ass chain, but if so, how did it not throw up red flags all around letting this guy wear it around that machine.
It wasnt a necklace…
It was a literal metal chain, like steel. Not a gold cuban link chain or something with a huge medallion a rapper would wear.
Apparently this idiot just lived everyday with a 20lb length of chain around his neck for “weight training”. The article mentions it was “a topic of discussion” on a prior visit, so it wasn’t a one time thing.
The type of person to do that, is 100% the type of guy to run into an active MRI like he could do anything. Theres no logical thinking going on, and an outright refusal to listen to qualified medical advice. Like, they make weighted vests, at least do that instead of putting all that weight on your neck.
Yeah, there was a guy in my town who would run around with one of these around his neck. Similar type of idiot. He would actually run by the strength training gym and gloat to us that we were wasting our time lol, insisting that all we had to do was run around with a big chain.
Hearing about this news story now I wonder if some influencer somewhere started a trend. People love feeling like they found “the secret”
The type of person to do that, is 100% the type of guy to run into an active MRI like he could do anything. Theres no logical thinking going on, and an outright refusal to listen to qualified medical advice.
Darwin, engage!
“weight training”
Holy shit, Goku died
how did it not throw up red flags all around letting this guy wear it around that machine.
He wasn’t allowed in the room.
His wife panicked in the MRI, he charged into the room he was told not to go Into.
The wife asked to see her husband. I don’t think the blame rests solely on the couple. The nurse should’ve stepped in. I’m also not sure why there wasn’t a emergency stop button.
Imagine the scene from her POV. She’s claustrophobic and having a meltdown because of all the hums and bangs and then her husband comes running in only to get pulled into the machine she is already stuck inside of. He’s screaming and can’t get pulled free while she is being pushed even harder into the machine she so desparately wants free from - by her husband who is quickly suffocating to death
While you wrote an interesting narrative, if you read the article the story is nothing like this, and even from her point of view would have been nothing like this.
She had asked the nurse to call her husband to help her up from the table. She called out his name and he ran in while the machine was still going.
He was pulled into the machine and was freed eventually but suffered multiple heart attacks after being pulled off the machine. The heart attacks are what killed him in the end in a hospital bed far from the MRI machine. He definitely did not suffocate.
It was a knee MRI. She wasn’t stuck inside it, she just wanted her husband to help get her off of the table instead of just the technician.
Still a horrible scene though, but not quite as horrific as your first imagining.
There probably wasn’t any screaming. MRIs exert thousands of pounds of force at close range. You can imagine what thousands of pounds of metal would do to a neck.
thousands of pounds of force at close range
So tragic, jesus. Also, it was obviously stupid, but in his defense he probably went into fight or flight and wasn’t thinking. Unfortunately he paid for it with his life.
He went in to help her stand up from the machine.
9kg is around 20 pounds. what, did he have a kettlebell as a pendant?
the answers to all your questions lie in the article you didn’t read
The article doesn’t really answer much about the necklace though. I want to see a picture of it and understand why the fuck someone would wear it. Like “for weigh training” but what the fuck is he exercising on a random day in the hospital.
What kind of hospital let him get near the room with that kind of metal around his neck? I’ve had to be in several hospitals recently for different imaging issues and every time the MRI is a thing I have to remove everything metal to go past a certain door (escorting my daughter and son for medical reasons). I don’t know who let him anywhere near the room with something that large.
Edit for Clarity: I’ve had to be the one removing all metal even though I’m not the one being scanned. For me to progress beyond a certain part of the hospital toward the MRI I needed to get rid of everything. My children were being scanned, not me. So, I’m not sure what hospital system allowed this man with a 9kg chain get this far deep into the imaging area.
He wasn’t supposed to be in the room. There was a scan in progress when he entered.
Seems to me all they needed was a magnet of equal or greater strength placed opposite of, and perhaps a bit closer to the doorway, to pull intruders away from the MRI room.
His wife told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table. She said she called out to him.
Whole thing is heart breaking all around. I feel for the technician who made an honest but very serious mistake. And I’m sure the wife will spend her days regretting asking for help. Just a fucking tragic situation. :/
all they needed was a magnet of equal or greater strength
MRI magnets are electromagnets that are supercooled with liquid helium and take hours to start or stop because of the electrical energy that has to be put in or taken out.
So just having a magnet of equal strengh for idiot defense would be a very significant waste of electricity and helium unfortunately
But it would be funny
take hours to start or stop
You mean they’re in constant operation the whole shift?
Surely dialed way down in between scans?No, the magnets are just as dangerous when scans aren’t happening. They are always on.
Maybe lockable doors
Idk bc some of the articles seem to be contradicting but apparently the door had a lock and the deck opened it
Dude was wearing a 20lb chain while his wife was getting an MRI.
She freaked, and yelled for him, and he ran into the room while the machine was still on and fucking died.
This is 100% their fault, I could almost see an argument that the door needs a lock to prevent idiots with 20l s of metal around their neck from running in, but you don’t want to lock everyone out in case there’s an issue.
Just for your information, the machine, meaning the magnet, is ALWAYS on.
Unless something gets stuck. Then it is shut down and restarted after the thing is removed. Takes hours though, I think the startup was four hours.
They had that happen at the hospital my father worked at, the cleaning lady brought in a stool with steel legs. They tried to remove it by force first, but four men could not do it.
You could put an airlock like metal detector door that only opens the second door, if the first door is closed and there’s nothing magnetic inside. People could still go in quickly in emergencies, but nothing that makes it worse can enter.
As much as the machines cost, something like that wired up with a metal detector so that if the machine is on and there’s metal in the airlock it will never open would actually be a good solution…
But it would take a society that values human life and absence of suffering over money. Because like someone else pointed out, the hospital ain’t the one paying to fix the machine.
Maybe Canada would be interested?
This basically never happens. You want to spend billions guarding against humanity stupidity? Good luck with that.
But it would take a society that values human life and absence of suffering over money.
🙄
Nah, let them stupids die. I don’t want to risk non idiots lives for the chance of saving a moron.
I apologize if im completely misunderstanding, but what “non idiots” are at risk, in what circumstances? Shouldn’t there always be a tech?
I’m just thinking about the poor woman. She’s forever going to be haunted with the knowledge that she was the one who called him into the room, and thus led to his death. His decision to come in wasn’t thought out, but that probably won’t relieve her feelings of guilt for having called him in. Such a tragic story.
She’s not going to have one whit of self awareness. I may be going out on a limb here, but it doesn’t sound like he was exactly the sharpest bulb in the ocean, and her reported cry to “turn off” the MRI (despite the repeated screenings you get prior to an MRI, warnimg patients about metal) indicate she isn’t either. She’s 100% gonna blame the provider and sue, adding to the rising cost of healthcare.
This is a really unempathetic response. I know shit’s tough right now and there are a lot of fools out there, but I beg you to at least try to give the benefit of the doubt and try to think through why people might do the things they do, especially when it’s someone enduring a personal tragedy that’s being publicly scrutinized. Think about the poor old woman who had hot coffee spilled on her crotch at a drive through and endured agonizing disfiguring burns - McDonald’s ran a campaign to paint her as a scammer and opportunist when she had done nothing wrong at all.
Most people don’t intentionally endanger themselves or their loved ones and they are usually very deferential to authority, especially in medical settings. There’s nothing to indicate this was any more than a miscommunication involving a heavily blinged-out guy who did nothing wrong. The MRI folks didn’t think to brief him because he wasn’t in the danger zone. His wife called for help. Maybe a very observant doctor could have noticed the guy’s jewelry and gave him a warning. Maybe the wife could have recalled that her husband was wearing metal before calling for him. Maybe the doctors could have better screening procedures for people in the waiting area, or better procedures to control access to the MRI room. I can’t say based on the available information that anyone lacks self awareness or did anything obviously wrong here. Sometimes a lot of coincidences line up to make something terrible happen.
Easy solution : have a pure gold necklace, since gold isn’t magnetic
18kt gold is an alloy with 75% gold and other metals that may be magnetic. I wouldn’t trust a gold chain around my neck with an MRI.
9kg of gold is worth close to $1mill. Mr T is baller enough to do that
Apparently the chains started when he was a bouncer. Sometimes people would lose them, while getting kicked out. He would wear them, so that had to come and ask him politely for them. His collection built when they were either too scared, or too egotistical to ask for them back.
IIRC Mr T stopped wearing his gold chains because he came to feel that they were tone deaf.
Was the necklace even related to the death? It says he had a “series of heart attacks” which doesn’t sound like something caused by being pulled toward the machine.
If the necklace impeded blood flow or even put a lot of strain on his circulatory system then it could have caused his heart attacks.
Sounds like it wasn’t him being pulled towards the machine that killed him, it was being pinned against the machine for a prolonged period of time.
yeah what annoyed me was the Lady asking to just turn it off like you can just turn it off. i know she is desperate to undo her and her husband’s stupidity but the article framing those quotes like the tech was incompetent is bad journalism.
You absolutely can turn it off - it’s called quenching the magnet, and the tech absolutely should have been trained to do that in an emergency. There was no way in hell they were physically pulling him off. It’s obviously that they did eventually, but the article doesn’t say how long it took 🤷♂️ to be fair, I’d bet that basically all of the damage was done up-front, regardless - MRI magnets are so much stronger than most people realize.
9 fucking kilograms!? For my fellow Americans, that’s almost 20 pounds!
I feel like someone should have noticed. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen someone wearing a twenty pound necklace.
I always knew Roughneck McGee would meet a tragic end. Ironically he wasn’t even wearing his BIG necklace.
Can you convert that to tennis balls? I can’t do this math on my own
Somewhere between 150 and 160, depending on the tennis balls. Hope this helps
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=9kg+%2F+mass+of+a+tennis+ball
Edit: Additionally, that’s about 63½ European swallows, assuming an average weight of 5 ounces. Given that a European swallow must beat its wings 43 times per second to maintain airspeed velocity, it’d be a proper racket.
Tap for spoiler
Those numbers are from monty python and the holy grail and are very wrong. I am spreading misinformation online.
And if it’s an African swallow?
Not covered in the film and I refuse to get my information anywhere other than Monty Python. The mass of an african swallow is therefore unknowable.
It’s a fair cop
Society is to blame
I’m upset that I can only like this once.
The only units I understand are bananas or bald eagles. Please adjust accordingly
It’s seventy-nine sticks of butter, plus a pat or two
Aka 6 “knobs,” according to Gordon Ramsey.
aka “the bare minimum”
So many dumb ways to die…
9 kilograms Necklace?! What kind of necklace is that?
This was not Mr. T.
This was Mr. D Capitated.
Ooh mind you don’t cut yourself on all that edge!
A chain with a 9kg bell weight.
The man, 61, had entered the MRI room while a scan was underway
How was that allowed?
he asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table.
…while the machine was still working? And isn’t that the job of the technician anyway?
the technician helped her try to pull her husband off the machine but it was impossible.
Those machines have a kill-switch for a reason.
I call this BS or a very incompetent technician.
Plus a Darwin award for the guy.Couple things:
The magnet is ALWAYS on.
The “kill switch” takes about five minutes to actually deactivate the magnet and it costs about thirty grand in helium every time you push it.
Isn’t it an electomagnet?
it costs about thirty grand in helium every time you push it.
Oh, right, i forgot human lives have a price in the US.
Its a superconducting magnet that cannot be instantly shut off. I am sorry that the physics of this makes you so angry.
It’s a super conducting electromagnet, and if you quench it instantly pieces would be flying all over the room
The US is an outlier in how it charges prices for healthcare services.
But every country in the world has prices charged for cold liquid helium. It’s very expensive to gather, process, store, and ship, regardless of what kind of health care economics apply in your country.
Not just the helium, there’s a considerable time spent “recharging” the magnet with electricity - many patients will lose access to MRI scan service during the multiple days it is down for recharge.
I’m sure he was barely trained and had specific instructions to “never push that button!” When you whole life in the country is tied to your employment, it’s every moron for themselves.
Depends on the machine type. Closed bore machines (the vast majority) use supercunducting electromagnets that are surrounded by liquid helium that creates a very strong magnetic field. To demagnetize them requires dumping the helium.
Some open bore machines use electromagnets, but they’re much less common and not as powerful.
So the helium itself becomes magnetized, is that it?
the helium is liquid, which it only is when it is very very cold.
The superconductor will keep it’s magnetic field forever, as long as it’s superconducting, and it will stay superconducting while it is very very cold.There is physically no way (as in, it is simply impossible, due to how our world works, not money, not people, not technology) to instantly “switch off” the magnet.
it needs to go above a certain temperature, to lose it’s superconducting nature, and it needs to do it at a pace that doesn’t dump a GINORMOUS amount of energy in this magnetic field instantly, because that would be even worse.
the fault here is in allowing anyone with any magnetic metal anywhere near an MRI. And whoever let that happen is going to have a very bad week.
No, the liquid helium cools the magnets to the point where they become superconductive. As to how that works exactly, I do not know. I don’t think I have the math for it.
It’s not an electromagnet, it’s a superconducting magnet. And turning it immediately off makes it melt.
It’s both! MRI magnets are electromagnets that are cooled down to 4 Kelvin using liquid helium. Once they reach those low temperatures, they become superconducting. This way, the magnet isn’t gobbling up tons of electricity to stay at the desired field strength. Instead, the liquid helium needs to be replenished occasionally to keep it at superconducting temperature. Source: I work with MRI scanners.
The kill switch is VERY expensive to press, many thousands of dollars, and even when it does an “instant” magnet quench, by the time you hear the screams it’s all over anyway, the metal has landed on the magnet. Quenching the magnet will make it let go, but it won’t unbreak the neck bones.
the high powered magnet is always on. it’s never safe to put metal near and MRI.
Dude didn’t watch Final Destination Bloodlines 💀
We need a /c/NotFinalDestination, this is literally one of the scenes in the last entry to the franchise.
Again, why aren’t there metal detectors at the entrances to MRI machines everywhere? For the cost of those machines, the cost of a metal detector is peanuts
not at all practical. a big ol buzzer would have prevented this maybe, but really it’s the relaxed culture around the MRI that let it happen. people need to be told either you don’t go past the big heavy door with the NO METALS sign, or you get all the metal off you now, or both.
It really sucks, but of course it was an idiot from Nassau county 🙄
For anyone who might not know the area, Nassau County is the place that gave us George Santos. It is burgundy-red, only bested in racism by Suffolk county. The police departments are notoriously racist and will pull you over and interrogate you just for driving a beater. This was one of Trump’s favorite police departments during his first term, he infamously told them to bash people’s heads against their cop cars when arresting them.
Sadly there are many very left leaning people trapped on Long Island, unable to leave because LI is an employment wasteland. It’s not cheap to live on LI either.
Anyways, an idiot from Nassau won’t be missed.
To be fair this seems like a honest oversight
He entered the imaging room unauthorised. It was an honest Darwin Award
…someone probably should’ve stopped him
You don’t know what you don’t know. He probably wasn’t even thinking about how MRI machines work.
Cube: MRI
Carrying a 9kg necklace seems a bit silly. Though I suppose “for weight training” could just as well mean something medical, like needing to build up muscle mass after an operation.
What I need to know is: how is a man that was “not supposed to be in the room” specifically getting fetched by a technician to go into the room? I would have said “do not go past the antechamber” a dozen times on the way there. Did the wife calling out to him just turn off his brain, did the technician fail to inform him, or did they both not realise the metallic necklace was on him?
After reading another article: nope, necklace was just a huge locket on a chain. And the wife said “Keith, Keith, come help me up” which sound to me like:
- wife was making a big fuss for no good reason (might have had a reason according to a 3rd article)
- husband obeyed as any good husband would
- technician didn’t inform the husband that his wife would be carted out of the MRI room and failed to react fast enough
If I was married and a bit dumber, I could probably also be lured to my death with my name being called out twice in that fashion. Really depends how good the signage was and how well the husband was informed.
They have extensive screening and education and safeguard procedures, for the patients. I’m guessing hubby skipped (probably wasn’t even offered) all those and just dashed in the door when called. Tech still should have put hubby through “the talk” if he was anywhere close to the door to the room.
MRI is one of the most sci-fi come to life technologies most people are likely to encounter in their lives. Superconducting magnets are about as non-intuitive as it gets, once they get you past the point of your ability to resist the force, there’s no recovery - you’re going faster and faster until the metal hits the housing. There have been multiple accidents with steel oxygen cylinders - for the obvious reason: they’re so common in the environment where MRIs are used, and it’s no small feat to get the cylinder removed.
