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A country doctor saved the life of an Australian teenager by boring a hole into his skull with a household power drill to remove a blood clot.

Nicholas Rossi, who celebrated his 13th birthday yesterday, was suffering from the same type of head injury that killed the actress Natasha Richardson in March.

The emergency brain surgery was carried out at the hospital in Maryborough, a small city 100 miles northwest of Melbourne, after Nicholas fell off his bike and bumped his head outside a friend’s house. His mother, Karen, a nurse, took him to hospital as he began to lose consciousness.

The duty doctor, Rob Carson, noticed that Nicholas, who had suffered a fractured skull, was showing signs of bleeding on the brain. This can can cause death within minutes.

Dr Carson had no neurological equipment to hand but found the next best thing in the hospital maintenance room: a DeWalt power drill, which was sterilised for surgery.

“Dr Carson came over to us and said, ‘I am going to have to drill into \ to relieve the pressure on the brain — we’ve got one shot at this and one shot only’,” the boy’s father, Michael Rossi, told The Australian newspaper.

He later said: “Dr Carson told me all he can remember saying is, ‘Get the Black & Decker’.”

The doctor, who had never performed such a procedure before, phoned David Wallace, a Melbourne neurosurgeon, who talked him through the operation, telling him where to aim the drill and how deep to go. Soon, a blood clot fell out, relieving the pressure on the boy’s brain.

Mr Rossi said: “We didn’t see anything, but we heard the noises — heard the drill. It was just one of those surreal experiences.

“Human nature takes over and you just do what you have to do and the doctor just does what he has to do.”

David Tynan, the anaesthetist who assisted Dr Carson, said that the case was very similar to what had happened to Natasha Richardson, who died this year of a brain haemorrhage after falling and hitting her head on the ice while skiing in Canada.

Dr Tynan said: “Mr Wallace, the neurosurgeon, basically said it was a classic case of \ the movie actress . . . you think nothing’s wrong but she had a bleed and you go unconscious and don’t wake up.”

Nicholas was later flown to a larger hospital in Melbourne and returned home yesterday in time to celebrate his 13th birthday.

Mr Rossi said: “He started his teenage years with a bang.”

Dr Carson played down his role in saving Nicholas’s life. “It is not a personal achievement, it is just a part of the job and I had a very good team of people helping me,” he said.

Richardson, the wife of the Irish actor Liam Neeson and a member of the Redgrave acting dynasty, died on March 18 at the age of 45. A post-mortem report concluded that the cause of death was “epidural haematoma due to blunt impact to the head”.

The DeWalt power tool company was bought in 1960 by Black & Decker, which now uses the name for its yellow-and-black professional-quality tools.

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