Man wearing metallic necklace dies after being sucked into MRI machine

>You are allowed to put patients under general with no one else present? That doesn't seem like it should be possible

Every day in ORs around the world manuy thousands of anesthesiologists — and CRNAs where approved — put patients under general with no one else present. Are you proposing that two anesthesiologists be assigned per patient, like scheduled airlines?

Should piloting a plane solo be outlawed?

If, after three years of residency and roughly 1,500 cases done under supervision, many more done without supervision, a written examination, and an oral examination, you aren't qualified to administer a general anesthetic solo, then you have NO business giving general anesthesia no matter how many other qualified or unqualified others are present.

There's always someone else. But the radiologist might not be at his/her most efficient doing anesthesia & resuscitation...

It's not darkened on purpose, but as a result of containing electromagnetic radiation shielding.

From a cursory search, seems like 1. Privacy, and 2. RF shielding of equipment behind the glass and from influencing the MRI scan itself.

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There's some sort of latching mechanism to seal the faraday cage. Sometimes it's a latch, sometimes it's pneumatic or a bladder that inflates.

The doors can also lock (I'm pretty sure they are required to be locked when qualified personnel are not present) but usually they are not locked when the scanner is staffed and in use.

We have ear defenders and staff inside and monitoring visible in both locations -- anaesthetic machine in the control room. There's not much you can safely do in the fringe field but you can do CPR and rapidly get someone out of the room (and before my spinal injury I used to practice both of those regularly, particularly when part of a team scanning patients with inotropes)

So no one can accidentally walk into the room while wearing metal while it is on, to prevent injuries like the post we're commenting on, from happening.

Just in case, Con Kolivas, a prominent contributor to the Linux kernel, is also an active and practicing anesthesiologist. People are awesome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_Kolivas

I think the sorting hat outcomes for technical polymaths and driven entrepreneurs is the hat is sometimes quantum, and can rightfully put you into any or multiple houses at Hogwarts? Like Harry.

Last time I had a major surgery the anesthesiologist at Stanford was also simultaneously a full time employee of Apple. (At the time we were competitors; we figured out during surgical prep that we had friends/colleagues in common.)

Similarly, while working at another FAANG company, one of my colleagues was simultaneously a practicing MD (PCP) at Stanford. He later left both jobs, to start own biz.

At one point he referred me to another Stanford doc who was simultaneously the founder of a diagnostic-tech startup, which sadly has since fizzled.

Lastly, I know a practicing anesthesiologist married to a serial entrepreneur who's built and sold stuff you've heard of. They or some of their hundreds of employees may be here, dunno. Won't out them.

Maybe he's a midnight hacker?

I work as a programmer, but it was and still is my hobby. And I could have ended up in a different line of work. In which case I'd most likely still be here but with a different day job experience.

HN users cover a broad spectrum of people, computer developers are just a subset.

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Deaths in the OR like cardiac arrests, fatal hemorrhage from burst aneurysms, etc. are always reported within the hospital. Whether others outside learn about such things is often a matter of persistent family and relatives demanding to see the actual death report and contemporaneous notes.

Fatal mistakes usually stay within hospital departments and are discussed at length in regular confidential Morbidity and Mortality conferences.

This time it killed someone. Usually, it's just a bed or a respirator that ends up stuck in the ring.

My dad's cancer spread to the bones in the spine and rib cage. He told me it was incredibly challenging and exhausting to stay still during scans as it just hurt so bad. Several times they had to redo scans as he moved.

I can certainly imagine there are many similar scenarios where it's just not possible for a patient to be completely still, or it's better for them to avoid excessive rescans.

To add to the sibling comment, being stuck in a small, incredibly loud tube usually pinned under some receiver isn't great for claustrophobic patients either.

A lot of people get panic attacks / claustrophobia and are incapable of getting in or staying still for a scan.

I have a lot of sympathy. I'm pretty good in confined spaces usually, but even after multiple MRIs it's still a surprisingly stressful experience. The buildup and safety questions make the pre-experience worrying. The aperture is surprisingly small. Depending on the scan, part of you might be caged in place, and it's extremely noisy and you're aware of a lot of mass and power spinning very close to your face.

Also, some of the radiologists don't help. It's not deliberate, but they're entirely desensitised to the experience (and often haven't actually gone through it themselves; which again seems crazy considering the lack of radiation). My last scan was of my lower back, but they were already set up (from the previous scan) to feed me in head first rather than feet first. From their point of view it saves a bit of faffing with the software and moving the pillow to the other end. From a patients point of view it makes all the difference in the world; it's a very different psychological experience having your legs inside with your head free, vs being stuck head first in something and having it whizz past next to your head.

I've had a goodly (read unhealthy) number of CT and MRI scans and I'm bright enough to understand which one is significantly more detrimental to my long term health. I'm also aware that on a subconscious almost cellular level, it's the benign one that absolutely terrifies me every time...

Critically ill patients, animals, children/babies.

The cost isn’t the issue.

Quenching the magnet takes up to several minutes. There are also alarms to warn people to get away because the rapidly expanding helium could displace oxygen in the room.

It’s not about the cost. If there’s an emergency that necessitates pressing the button they’ll be pressing it as soon as someone can reach it. It still takes time for the magnetic field to dissipate.

I’m pretty sure when some guy gets sucked into the machine, the downtimes/lawsuits/etc and pressing the emergency button and having a ton of down time is a sunk cost at that point and you are basically obligated to do everytyhing you can to avoid catastrophe to reduce your legal peril.

If anyone is curious what pushing the button to turn off (AKA "quench) the magnet looks like, there's this video of an MRI machine being decommissioned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SOUJP5dFEg

You push the button, then 15 seconds later the liquid helium is vented through a pipe on the roof of the hospital (it's quite a spectacular display), and then the superconductor starts to heat up and no longer be a superconductor so the current that's been flowing through the coils (they are energized once, when the machine is first installed, and then continue flowing forever so long as the superconductor is superconducting since there's no resistance) and the magnetic field decays to nothing.

It's not an instantaneous process.

> The journalist missed a golden opportunity for education here: most MRI scanner magnets cannot be turned off like that.

Thanks for that - and it reminded me of the sad state media is today. I read the same story in about 4 papers and nowhere was written _why_ they couldn't turn off the machine.

Miss the days where journalists actually read what they have written.

> most MRI scanner magnets cannot be turned off like that. For the few that can, it's going to cost >$50,000 just to refill the liquid helium, not to mention the real and opportunity costs associated with rendering the machine offline for days or weeks.

I thought these days, most MRIs did have an emergency quench button.

> For the few that can, it's going to cost >$50,000 just to refill the liquid helium

In this case, they were going to have to do that anyway. Might as well shut it down right away.

MRI techs do not think about it cost when life is at danger. If someone is in life danger due to the magnet, you quench. This is standard MRI education.

I think the big question here is why they didn’t..

You are going to have to turn it off if there’s a body attached to your machine too, so that’s not much of a lost opportunity.

This is already a common practice. One of the issues with the standard implementation is that it’s set up as an administrative control rather than an engineering control (which would be significantly more difficult/expensive/space-consuming). At least one other comment thread has discussed the airlock implementation that I’m sure a very large number of people have independently thought of.

I recently had an MRI in one of those full-body MRI machines.. and we went through two locked doors and they used a wand on me (like they have at airports) to scan my body, even after I answered that I had no metal anywhere in my body. There were 3 operators/nurses in the inner ring of all this, operating machines.. securing my limbs, etc.

So at least in some places, this is the SOP.

Or gate it, period - nobody should get in that easily.

MRI operator here: the false alarms from all the metal that’s fine are an issue. Most people have some in/on them and it’s usually fine.

What if people used their eyeballs and their common sense? Everyone failed here.

Is there any indication this man was aggressively trying to enter the room before the technician eventually let him in? The article just says his wife called out to him, then the tech let him in and that's it.

They do. You'll be hard pressed to find a magnet room without this [0] sign on the door. That said, it's probably not that warning to most people. Fridge magnets are always on too.

0 - https://www.zzmedical.com/exclusives/mri-warning-wall-sign-m...

Tech: "ok we're done here"

Wide: "honey can you come in here and help me since I don't have my walker"

<dude walks right in and gets dead>

Not hard to imagine something like that happening too fast to be stopped, especially if staff is distracted by the transition from running an MRI to getting the patient in/out.

It seems like there could be a double door situation. Go through the first door, close it. The room detects metal, and only unlocks the door to the MRI if the other door is closed and no metal is in the room.

I’m not sure what kind of emergency would warrant allowing metal to pass through when metal is detected, if there is a risk of death for using it.

There is (at least according to one episode of _Grey's Anatomy_) a big scary red button to shut down the machine in an emergency, resulting in expensive to restore operation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m9algh/e...

According to the above post, it's a venting of the liquid helium, which requires ~$25,000 to replace).

Nobody should have permission and be kept away at all times by staff. They'd probably follow rules for a while now.

There is a video of it floating around for the morbidly curious. I won't link it here. It is very NSFL. I was accidently shown it while scrolling instagram and wish I hadn't seen it.

He is able to talk, you can make out his words, but he is clearly choking or being strangled. He was fully sucked into the machine. There was a very strong guy trying with everything to pull him out. He made some pretty sad and harrowing words when he realized he wasn't going to make it. Again, the video is out there if you really want to see it. I do NOT recommend it though.

The article covers the timeline of his death. Whatever the details they weren't so incapacitating as to prevent him from saying goodbye to his wife before losing consciousness.

Yes, and didn't die until the next day.

I believe many articles are leaving these parts unsaid due to sensational assumptions they benefit from in virality.

EDIT: source https://healthimaging.com/topics/medical-imaging/magnetic-re...

It was for weight training (according to [0]). Weightlifters wear them on the neck to help build neck muscle.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/21/new-york-mri...

Why wouldn't every human being involved in this be essentially screaming at him not to bring that thing anywhere near MAGNETIC resonance imaging?

The wife says the chain and lock were for weight training.

This explains so much. I was wondering how in the hell the damn chain I've already broken twice with mere snags was going to hurl my body through the air towards a machine like that.

Yeesh, what would happen with a wedding ring? If it was a magnetic band would it just sheer through your finger whizzing towards the machine?

Read the article.

>She said he was wearing a 20lb (9kg) chain with a lock that he used for weight training.

Someone said it was a strength training thing, some crossfit cult thing of carrying heavy crap around your neck.

I don't think the human body is that fragile, the magnet probably dragged his body, head first, until it hit a solid object, in this case the cover of the MRI machine. Slamming your head at that speed isn't that healthy.

I see hyperbole is misunderstood here.

The article says he had time to say goodbye to his wife before he suffocated and later died at a hospital.

Which makes sense since it's about the same timeline of death and outcome you'd expect from an industrial accident involving big industrial chain at a hundred pounds per link or whatever.

There are people who flock towards information about technology (probably almost everyone here as well as many in their social circles) and there are people who run from information about technology.

I know people who if you tried to explain an MRI to them, would become visibly uncomfortable and search for any way to change the topic.

> "What if my leg bone actually has metal in it for some reason?!"

I have a titanium plate in my head, so it's not magnetic.

When the MRI tech asked if I had any metal in me, I said I had titanium on my skull.

She asked if I was sure it was titanium.

I knew it was, but I was nervous, so I said, "I think so."

She half-joked, "Well, if it's not, we'll find out real quick."

It was titanium.

But they never really double-checked or anything.

Part of me thinks that because of my age, she could tell it wasn't iron or anything dangerous.

But another part of me feels like she honestly didn't care that much and meant it when she said we'd find out fast.

I think people are just not aware of how bad it is. People might think it's "fork in microwave" oopsie bad, not "fire at the gas station" fatal bad.

Both can be true. We learn to fear and respect modern technology because of training and reinforcement that might occur as part of learning.

Consider the “Things I Won’t Work With” column. There is a healthy degree of respect for various compounds that’s learned with experience. This is similar to the way that (properly trained) electricians work with electricity, and nuclear plant techs work around radioactive material.

> "What if my leg bone actually has metal in it for some reason?!"

I had that constant thought for the 15 minutes of my knee MRI (except s/leg bone/body/). Most discombobulating.

Hehe, in my case I used to have a metal filling that was removed, but I was still worried about a missing piece of it or something.

Apparently it's not an issue, even if you do have them.

Tarantulas covers A LOT of spiders (around 1100 different species). You still have to at least be a bit careful around them since they have urticating hairs.

> Poisonous snakes, on the other hand, tend to be much less chill. Much like wasps, they seem to enjoy causing pain and suffering.

Eh, I don't know about that. For example, sea snakes, despite being incredibly venomous, are actually pretty timid creatures.

Also:

https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-betwee...

Wasps aren't sadists.

Another good question is why do we have a sense for detecting things that appear vaguely human but aren't (uncanny valley)?

I'd say about 1/5 of the MRI centers I've been to had metal detectors before entry. And 0/5 had ones that were turned on.

Fear of snakes is also biological. Look up the cat cucumber videos.

It won’t shear it straight through your body though. The path of least resistance is to spin you around and then fly off. That doesn’t quite work if the thing is around your neck though.

Just a sensitive metal detector around the doorway where you enter the MRI room. It sounds like this guy would have had the metal detector blaring before he even crossed the threshold.

"There's a huge evil magnet that will tear you apart if you have any metal on you" sounds much easier to grasp and less likely to lose the listener's attention. Then, when you have them listening: "It can grab you from outside the room and hurl you into the machine where the evil magnet lives! Any metal, be it coins, necklaces, pins in your bones, belt buckles, bra wiring, dog tags. Anything can be the end of you, be damn sure you don't have any metal on you."

Oh, wait, you still want them willing to go near the machine? That complicates things a bit ;)

Not to mention that "gauss" sounds deadlier than "tesla" to begin with. Talking about choosing the right units.

Same for 2°C of global warming…

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/3106/

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You're going to have to hit the quench button at some point anyway, just to remove the chain (and the body attached to it; it's not like you can bring in a pair of bolt cutters to disconnect them if the machine is still operational -- that will only add to the problem). You may as well quench it immediately.

I wasn't going to click that link but now I have and honestly - that is mildly terrifying.

I don't understand how such a dangerous machine can end up in a place that looks like that.

If it weren't so dangerous, I'd love to pop along to my local tanning salon and get an MRI scan. I've always been quite interested to see an MRI of my brain. Alas, I'm stuck with waiting for some kind of medical testing to need some test subjects to scan, or a university student needing someone to learn to use an MRI on. Or I guess have a head injury serious enough to need an MRI, but that's less desirable

That size of building is relatively normal for a non-hospital MRI facility.

Depending on the mass they may have been able to remove it manually. A colleague used to use paperclips to study the field lines, and those had very little force.

They probably left it until the next maintenance cycle. Nobody wants the downtime.

>Installation must have been a bit nerve wracking!

They almost certainly just selected a drywall anchor based on the rating advertised on the package and sent it without any more thought, their ass was covered.

Big picture people who take a step back think about what they're doing don't tend to find themselves installing projectors in hospitals, or if they do they aren't there very long.

When that dude got to throw the wrench at the MRI, you know he was having his best day at work ever. I wouldn't be able to be on camera because of giggling.

The flying wrenches remind me of the Gravity gun i Half-Life 2 :D

Last time I went to an MRI, there was a prep room before the MRI machine. There was a stern and visible warning to remove anything metallic from your body before going through the second door. I am fully aware if the pins on my leg were affected, the machine would gladly remove them from my, most likely along with the bone and the leg they are attached to.

A lot of fatal accidents are like that - a series of small mistakes nobody notices, each individually harmless, followed by THAT ONE BIG MISTAKE that ends up killing someone (or a lot of people).

People with 10kg chains around their neck might not be the kind of people that you can tell no to.

"you need to take off the chain"

"nah man, gotta hit my 5k steps wearing 20lb for my fitness goal"

"ok, well just don't go in the room"

"sure"

The kind of interaction that many people will pretty much forget having within the hour.

You would think a simple metal detector to go through before the lock on the MRI room door unlocks would be a requirement.

I guess maybe the MRI machine might interfere with metal detecting?

A good N52 neodymium magnet can be 1.5 tesla- MRIs are usually 1.5 tesla. The pull force is around the same too- a steel object will experience say 20g, and 100 lb fishing magnets are not hard to find.

The difference is the size. Even a large magnet only hits that 20g force over an inch or two. An MRI pulls at that force over a full foot or more; equivalent to dropping the object from 20'+. Worse, the MRI starts pulling at 5 or 10 feet away. Objects can experience a tremendous amount of uncontrolled acceleration in fractions of a second.

It's not like a black hole- unless you are trapped under something very large, the crushing force is substantial but not incredible. In fact inside the tube the gradient is actually smaller than the entrance of the tube- you are pulled in strongly, but once inside the tube you are pressed against the wall somewhat less forcefully. Instead it's like an invisible waterfall, and any metal will be swept away in it, fast enough to put holes in you.