Lucky cyclist survives tree branch impalement 2cm into neck

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...)

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.