Gross Anatomy: Stabbed by a Stick

Man drives to hospital with a branch stuck in his neck.

  • by MedPage Today Intern

Keeping his cool in a sticky situation, an otherwise healthy, and seriously lucky, 40-year-old man drove himself to the hospital with a tree branch piercing out of the side of his neck after taking a nasty fall from his mountain bike during an off-road excursion.

"With a branch in his neck, he jumped back on the bicycle, rode the bicycle to his car, and then drove the car to the hospital," which was about 20 miles from the accident, Lev Deriy, MD, of the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, in Albuquerque, said in a phone interview with MedPage Today. "Then he just showed up in the emergency room with a huge stick sticking out of his neck. It was very impressive."

Because of the stick's proximity to major neck vessels, attending physicians Deriy and Neal Gerstein, MD, ordered a CT angiogram to pinpoint the branch's precise location inside the soft tissue of the patient's punctured neck.

Somehow the biker managed to escape the accident with no vascular or airway injury, according to their report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The scan showed that the foreign object was lodged 1.6 centimeters deep at the level of the top of his Adam's apple, shooting all the way through the man's platysma muscle barely reaching the anterior margin of the sternocleidomastoid muscle.

A stick lodged that far inside a person's neck could have easily caused vascular, airway, nerve, and cervical spine injuries, the authors wrote, but this patient miraculously came out with nothing more than a small flesh wound. And kudos to the patient for not yanking the stick out on his own.

At the hospital, the surgeons removed the stick, explored for vascular and airway injuries, irrigated the wound and stitched it up. The patient's postop was uneventful, and he "will definitely mountain bike again," Deriy added.

And why not? After this, he should be used to staying calm when the stakes are high.

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