Neighbours and medics were left horrified when a 24-year-old Canadian woman got her her face injured when her car key tossed at her pierced her face, leaving a nearly two-inch hole! Renée Lariviere was leaving her apartment to go to dinner when one of her friends tossed her the car keys so that the group could head to McDonald’s. As she went to grab the keys from the air, she recoiled the catch towards her face, resulting in the metal part piercing her skin.
Shocking photos show the gory injury, as X-rays revealed it was nestled into her cheek, an inch-and-a-half deep into her nasal cavity and below her eye. At the time, Lariviere said the adrenaline numbed the pain from the accident.
“I felt a pressure, but I felt like I just got hit (with the keys) in the face, like I missed my catch,” she explained to Kennedy News and Media. “My friend looked at me and said, ‘Oh, my God, don’t move,’ and he started panicking.”
She recalled walking to the bathroom in denial, thinking her friend was exaggerating. To her surprise, her keys were sticking out of her face.
“I was scared. My concern was my eye,” she said. “I couldn’t care less about a scar. Scars, if you take care of them properly, will go away. That wasn’t my concern. My concern was, ‘Am I going to be able to see?’”
A scan revealed the key was lodged over an inch deep into her face. The group of friends phoned emergency services and an ambulance arrived within minutes. Upon arriving at the hospital, she received a CT scan, and a plastic surgeon was paged to remove the key and stitch up her cheek.
“The doctors there were amazed. There were doctors coming from different departments to see because they couldn’t believe it,” said Lariviere, who works for a landscaping company. “I had one of them come and ask to take pictures so he could show his students. He was an emergency room doctor, so he was trying to show them that anything could happen.” Thankfully, the wound healed — reportedly without a scar even — and she fully recovered. In disbelief that the incident occurred, she issued a stark warning to others that anything can happen. “Looking at it now, I’d think there’s no way that could even happen,” said Lariviere, who shared her shocking tale on TikTok in a series of clips that have collectively topped 12 million views. “It was a near miss. If it had hit somewhere else, it could have done quite a bit of damage.” Calling the incident “dumb luck,” she advised others to use caution when throwing around their keys or even just going about their daily life.