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.
Takes hours and is horrifically expensive.
Huh, I thought this was nonsense, but googling proved you’re right. Very cool TIL!
Surely dialed down in between scans?
No. They are usually superconducting magnets in persistent mode:
No it is only turned off during maintenance or by an emergency kill switch.
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.
🙄
MRI’s are still plenty dangerous when they aren’t scanning(“on”). The magnets don’t ever turn off unless you release all the helium which is typically a last resort. They can do it slowly for servicing but it’s costly or rapidly for emergencies but it usually trashes things.
Seems like the simplest solution is having a locking observation booth. Family can watch from the booth or go to the waiting room. This doesn’t prevent staff from responding to anything and actually keeps the family out of the way if there is an emergency. No high tech gizmos required. Are they go to like it? Probably not. Then off to the waiting room.
Thanks for the info!
Honestly tho, it’s pretty crazy they let dude roam around a hospital with 20lbs of chain around his neck. That’s literally a deadly weapon.
I don’t care what story he gave, he should have been told to leave it in his vehicle.
i wonder if he had neck pain, to carrying that much weight on his neck.
idk, maybe the hospital has insurance for idiocy. But the people that broke it almost certainly can’t afford an MRI machine, so they ain’t paying.
You could spend billions to implement crazy solutions for every possible scenario.
Or you could just tell the guy not to go in there.
“When you make something idiot-proof, the world builds a better idiot.”
You can idiot proof anything but the world just makes better idiots
That would not cost billions. Not even close. It would certainly be far cheaper than the cost of repair.
Did you forget that thousands of hospitals exist just in the US? Or at least did before 2025.
Not all of them have MRI machines, and regardless of its cheaper than repairing them.
Hundreds probably do though. I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anything like this happening. I think it’s probably exceedingly rare. I had an MRI and the number of times I heard and read the warnings about metal was exhausting. It feels almost impossible that someone could not know about that specific danger.
That would not cost billions. Not even close. It would certainly be far cheaper than the cost of repair.
“I have no idea what I’m talking about so I’ll just assume everything is cheap and easy”
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?
No apology necessary.
There are emergencies that could happen anywhere, including in an MRI room. Dealing with emergencies, ease of ingress and egress is paramount.
The proposed solutions would hamper access to these rooms during emergencies, putting patients and techs in harms way (the non idiots), in the name of preventing a moron from giving themselves a Darwin award.
I think it would be a net negative, ie. more people would die/get hurt trying to make an idiot proof enclosure.
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.
Uh she was in the room likely still on the bed laying down considering the story given. So like she’ll have some rowdy memories of dude getting mushed into a machine a speed then slowly suffocate if they weren’t lucky enough to hit their head really really fucking hard.
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.
Aren’t you just a shining beacon of logical, data-driven level-headedness. The fuck is she supposed to do, mentally recite each sign she saw on her way in as her spouse is being crushed before to determine if her request is feasible? Crawl out of the MRI, past her dying partner, and go read the manual to see if the MRI has an emergency stop capability before asking the technicians to intervene?
I wish you the best in your future human interactions. I hope very few of them are life-threatening because clearly, you’ll be of no help if you deem the situation avoidable or deem help unlikely to be successful.
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.
There is a lot of conflicting information in the articles im finding about this incident, from her shouting and him running in to him entering the room with the technician, and the technician knew about the chain and had commented on it.
Lmk if you need some examples, but theres a lot.
Im (cynically) inclined to believe that the hospital were the first to give statements and did a quick its-not-our-fault response. Then more people were interviewed. Ill always side with the working class (imo everyone who is not ruling class) rather than the corporations. And in the US the hospital is a corporation for sure.
There’s some gross racial spin surrounding this too, see pic below. It was a weighted padlock steel necklace for his weight training, not whatever is implied by yahoo.
Metal detector on the door to the room.
Don’t forget to pay the repairing fee for the machine
That door should absolutely be locked while in operation. That door being forced open should be an e-stop event.
Someone could walk in there with a firearm or a bowey knife or anything.
Then the door will always be locked, unless the MRI is being serviced, as the magnet is always active. Kinda kills the point of the machine, no? That said they could put in more safeguards for sure. Though you would think all the signs on and near the door, and the extensive explanation you get, would be enough. But here we are.
No, signs aren’t enough obviously. This is definitely not the first time we’ve heard of stories of people coming in with guns, chairs what have you.
It’s not everyday, so maybe it’s not warranted… But if you look at the things we apply security to we secure against a lot of things that never happen
Given the apparent danger of the device. There’s still plenty of options for security.
How about a set of man trap doors and a metal detector. The outside pair is unlocked. When you step through the metal detector, If a safe amount of metal is detected the outside door is locked and the inside doors unlock.
You don’t need a very sensitive metal detector The extra construction around two doors, and a small door controller / locks would be super insignificant to the price of the machine.
If you use cam locks the emergency egress would still be fine. Maybe you’d need to sense the outer door being shut to make sure somebody doesn’t hold the door for someone else.
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.
Where does it say he ran in? I Kean, what you say sounds right, but this doesn’t read like “freaking out”
Edit: Sounds like she did not freak out, but called to him to help her stand up after it was complete (bad knee), but before he was authorized to enter. This seems more like an honest mistake and tragedy. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/20/health/mri-machine-death-long-island
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.”Thank the gods for you. I was reading these comments thinking I was insane.
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.
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?
You should probably reread the articles if you still think it’s an actual necklace and not a weighted exercise tool.
I’m not gonna continue with this since you think trusting a professional is equivalent to trusting a stoplight
It’s the same thing as a stoplight. The green light just means it’s legal to go, not that it’s safe.
Same goes with your blind trust in professionals. Medicine is the last place you’d do that.
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”
It has all the Hallmarks…
Starts with something based in science, but never goes past surface logic and ignores lots of existing and safe options for the most visible and attention grabbing method despite the serious medical flaws from this method.
Even if you stay away from 1.5 tons magnets, that’s going to fuck your posture up before it translates to muscular gains.
Would Piccolo qualify as an influencer?
Depends on if we start to see musclebros running around wearing 50 lb turbans.
This trend spreads by chain letter.
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
He’ll be back.
Sounds like a possible Darwin award nomination.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
There was on one that I’ve been in, not sure about this one.
From my understanding, when an MRI is emergency stopped it doesn’t stop immediately, and it causes a lot of damage, so staff are less likely to use it in an emergency. Stupid, yes. But when you’re worried about getting fired for hitting a button, you’re less likely to think of a situation as an emergency. You would think “chain strangling a man” constitutes an emergency though…
As for the staff not stopping the guy making a beeline for the door with more than just words, I’m not sure. I would prefer staff tackle me to the floor rather than let me blithely walk to my doom. Of course I’m only in my 30s…
The hospital is absolutely partly to blame, especially if they didn’t properly convey the danger beforehand. All 3 hospitals I’ve recieved an MRI from have been pretty insistent about making sure I have no metal on or around me before I go in the doors though.
I’d say it’s about 60/40 on the hospital.
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.
Great! Could you kindly extract them to further our article-non-reading habits?
According to the article, it was a weight training chain
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.
Not to mention it’s not renewable. Once it his the upper atmosphere, you can’t get it back.
It’s Helium, it’s not exactly rare.
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.
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.
Dont they loose the access to the machine anyway for few day? Im under impression metal slamming to the machine usually breaks it pretty good.
Well, the thing is, to kill the magnetic field within a few seconds would break the machine, so they don’t do that because it would up the cost of a shutdown from tens of thousands of dollars to several hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the downtime would go from several days to potentially several months.
As it is they “quench” the superconducting electromagnet, which then requires a large amount of LH2 and electricity to get going again. I have heard numbers like $30,000 to get the magnet running again, not counting lost revenue during the many days it takes to get going.
Well the thing is still that the weighted necklace pulled by 1.5 to 3 tesla towards the machine will also put it the machine out if comission from several days to several months.
Also the down time of the machine depend from so many things like availbility of components, logistics and the actual damage happened, that even the most pragmatic operator could never calculate the price of the repair versus the value of the possibility of saving human life.
FFS the saved 30k only buys pretty decent slightly used car. Its sick to even start to weight that kind of money to human life.
And in fact, doesn’t the US have most of the world’s supply of helium?
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 a super conducting electromagnet, and if you quench it instantly pieces would be flying all over the room
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.
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.
TIL, thanks
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.
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
A - standard metal detectors probably won’t work well right at the MRI room door. Some facilities may have a longer hallway for access and putting one there, far from the actual MRI suite, would make a lot of sense (I think I visited one location that had that layout), but not all facilities are laid out in a way that that could work.
B - the nature of how a metal detector works would probably have negative impacts on MRI image quality if it is too close to the imager - even outside the shield room door.
I did a sort of tour of a couple dozen MRI facilities for a couple of years, the stronger ones all have radio-frequency shield rooms complete with metal / gasketed doors that are supposed to be closed during imaging. Actual practice regarding keeping those doors closed was pretty loose in the places / times I was visiting. And, in the article’s case it sounds like imaging wasn’t in progress so the door was probably standing open…
I’m sorry but it can’t be that hard to have an automated lock on the door. If metal detectors influence the machine, which is possible, then out them further away. Again, with MRI machines costing what they do, these aren’t the prices you would worry about.
it can’t be that hard to have an automated lock on the door.
No, but human factors dictate: it can be that hard to use the lock properly.
out them further away.
Some places do this, other places don’t have a good layout to make metal detectors a practical thing for the MRI suite.
with MRI machines costing what they do, these aren’t the prices you would worry about.
Often (depending on location), the most expensive part of the MRI suite isn’t the device, but the room itself.
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.
not at all practical
Simple question: why?
You put in a metal detector, and hell, a second door that won’t open if metal was detected. These aren’t the costs compared to the cost of a single MRI machine.
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.
So, an all aluminum chain then?
#Fashion
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.
That’s the story he told the news in the 80s after he was famous…
If you don’t think Mr T was playing Debo, I don’t know what to tell you.
IIRC Mr T stopped wearing his gold chains because he came to feel that they were tone deaf.
The best part about Mr. T’s gold necklaces is that he got the idea from working a bouncer. The man became a literal living mannequin, holding onto people’s gold chains like some kind of ass-kicking coat check.
it mustve been ferrous material, because gold isnt super magnetic. like steel or iron.
I believe it can still get hot
Moving fields, eddy currents still apply.
Copper isn’t magnetic either https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu1uRvErM80
Well, TIL. There goes my hopes of showing up to the MRI room with a giant gold necklace
Ehh, if you’re gonna go, it’ll at least be memorable :) I suspect we’ll both pass without even a lemmy shitpost.
Easier solution: take off your damned metal necklace.
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.
Can you imagine watching your loved one suffer and die in front of you? It sounds extremely brutal
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.
They come with an emergency stop button
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. :/
the technician who made an honest but very serious mistake.
You mean letting someone in while the machine was in operation?
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.
The dectector and the variable field (that induces the localized measurable changes) stop between scans, but the static magnetic field is kept up.
As long as you keep up the superconductitvity there is basically no electrical loss in the coils. Dialing the magnetic field down would require pulling out the energy, and reinjecting new energy to get the field back up. That’s the slow part, because injecting current quickly would heat the coil above superconductivity, leading to a quench.
I’m not sure how energy is withdrawn in the ordinary shutdown procedure, but I expect it is exchanged into heat and vented to the outside air in some way, rather than reinjected into the grid in a usable form. (The latter would require an inverter to turn the DC back into AC synchronized to the grid, probably would increase complexity by too much). So I suspect it would be wasteful too.
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
Surely 9kg necklace isn’t something you can just sneak around with, how was he allowed to get close enough to an MRI machine in the first place wearing it?
Hospitals aren’t jails or high security government facilities. I could walk around a hospital right now and walk into an MRI room and nobody would physically stop me. I used to work in a hospital and we had a long meeting about signs, because a cleaner didn’t look at the door sign and walked into an MRI room with a metal floor buffer.
I would need an entourage of physiotherapists if I had the bling to roll with a 9kg necklace.
Imagine how dope my rhymes would be though. A man can dream…
Because hospital staff have better things to do than baby sit every person that walks in? They are pretty well known for always being overworked already.
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.
9 fucking kilograms!? For my fellow Americans, that’s almost 20 pounds!
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.
It’s seventy-nine sticks of butter, plus a pat or two
Aka 6 “knobs,” according to Gordon Ramsey.
aka “the bare minimum”
The only units I understand are bananas or bald eagles. Please adjust accordingly
I used robots and the answer was 160 tennis balls, which is actually much less than I expected.
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.
So many dumb ways to die…
Another Darwin award.
Only if he didn’t have kids.
Yah the guy was 61 so it’s unlikely that Darwin would figure into the consequences.
People misuse the term “Darwin Award” a lot. It doesn’t just mean someone died in a dumb way, it means they died in a dumb way before passing on their genes.
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.
Uhm, article I read said it was a training accessory and the wife had fallen on the floor and needed help.
But the husband was called to get her off the table? Did she fall while the technician was away? Shouldn’t there have been a 2nd person to supervise her, or is that too expensive? And she did help in trying to get him unstuck, so she could get up on her own then? How are there so many important details to this?
That’s it, as fun as it is to speculate, I think I’ll reserve my judgement until after this has gone to court.
The major failure in this case was lack of education / restraint of the husband. Before he got within 25 feet of the MRI room door, he should have had “the talk” about metal objects and MRIs not mixing, deadly consequences, etc. Other things could have helped, but I suspect the local safety procedures are patient focused and hubby didn’t get properly educated before entering the danger zone.
Can’t even begin to imagine how the wife feels now.
She probably feels pulled in 2 directions. The weight of calling in her husband to charge in and help her must be great. I’m sure the tech is also crushed that they weren’t fast enough to oppose him entering the restricted area. It’s a tragic set of circumstances that will hopefully attract more awareness of the dangers of entering the MRI area if you haven’t properly prepared.
I had an MRI, many years ago, and had a very small sliver of metal in my finger tip. I didn’t know it was in there still. I felt the pain of it pulling as soon as I left the MRI tech’s control room.
hes going to have neck problems if he had lived, 20lbs on the neck will cause spinal deformities, and disc disease.
So glad to find that Lemmy is even less empathetic than reddit was. Real faith in humanity killer. Shocking how many people decided to comment without touching the article, really proud to be here…
Welcome to the freely accessible internet. I’m sure there are “private message boards” with much more rigorous vetting of their participants, if that’s what you need.
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.
Do not forget it was LI was basically kkk hq for a while.
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.
The technician let him in. There was an oversight somewhere but we don’t really know the details. Was the necklace under his shirt, was the receptionist on break, etc etc
Wearing a NINE kilogram necklace.
That’s like approaching a campfire with clothes made out of tinder after soaking in some gasoline and drinking alcohol.
He didn’t see the new Final Destination movie.
