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road.cc newsLucky cyclist survives tree branch impalement 2cm into neck
A man in the US suffered a freak injury after coming off his bike and being impaled in the neck by a tree branch.
The unidentified 40-year-old cyclist received the gruesome injury while riding off-road in New Mexico, apparently realising something wasn't right when he stood up.
Discovering the branch sticking out of his neck, lodged 2cm deep and just millimetres from his windpipe and a major artery, the man went back to the car with his bike and drove 20 miles to the nearest hospital.
Doctors said if he had pulled the branch out himself it could have caused more damage to the delicate structures in the neck.
Dr Lev Deriy, an assistant professor and anaesthesiologist at the University of New Mexico is reported by the Sticky Bottle as saying: “The neck contains a lot of very important, vital structures… (he was) lucky not to damage anything.”
CT scans show the stick clearly wedged into the man's flesh, though luckily avoiding all major blood vessels and his spine.
Surgeons operated on the man before closing the wound.
You can see pictures here (warning: gore).
Laura Laker is a freelance journalist with more than a decade’s experience covering cycling, walking and wheeling (and other means of transport). Beginning her career with road.cc, Laura has also written for national and specialist titles of all stripes. One part of the popular Streets Ahead podcast, she sometimes appears as a talking head on TV and radio, and in real life at conferences and festivals. She is also the author of Potholes and Pavements: a Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network.
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10 comments
Respect to your wife and to ERs, where staff have been kind to me when (A) I sailed from my bike, head-butted the road, and spent the afternoon in a state of childlike disorientation, and (B) I was SMIDSYed on a (relatively) high speed right hook coming off a steep hill. Plus I've worked for fifteen years on locked psychiatric units and understand well the difficulties faced by ER staff who must stabilize severely psychotic persons, or those who have attempted to end their own lives. My peevish remark was colored by having sat with my wife for something like nine hours as she awaited treatment for a painful but low-priority injury.
But was he wearing a helmet?
The neck contains a lot of very important, vital structures
I wonder if Dr Deriy's doctoral thesis was on the topic of stating the bleedin' obvious?
Annually in the U.S., over 1.5 million patients in hospitals acquire an infection they did not have when they turned up for treatment. About 100,000 of these patients die (well, they all die eventually...). So he is kind of lucky not to have been colonized by MRSA!
(Also, if you've seen the ERs here, you might be surprised that the stick didn't have time to take root and become a mighty oak on his neck...)
Don't knock ED depts. Where is the first place you'll be heading if (Heaven forbid it doesn't) you have a serious off and do you yourself a proper mischief?
Always remember when you are sitting in the waiting room, there is some poor bastard coming in through the Ambulance entrance, and I for one would rather wait than swap places with them.
P.S. Can you tell my wife used to work in ED??
Lucky bastard, I never get impaled by branches.
I'm sorry, that's just a BS story.
If you look at the CT scan, you can see the stick. Immediately below you can see a large muscle (sternomastoid), the white structures shaped like the peak of a mountain is his laryngeal cartilage which surrounds the windpipe (clearly not in danger) and the oval slightly less white blob are the vessels in the neck.
Hardly newsworthy to be honest. You see much worse all the time...
He missed a trick there; I'd have ridden to my local and ordered a pint, then said 'If it starts leaking out of my neck, please call an ambulance'.
I'm not surprised this happened, riding around with tape over your eyes is asking for trouble.
A cyclist falls from his bike, gets a tree branch stuck in his neck, drives 20 miles out of his way and needs an operation and you call him lucky?
I'm a cyclist, I didn't fall off or any of those things. I'm lucky.