Farmer Breaks Neck Miles from Anyone, So He Grabs His Own Hair and Does What He Has to Do
A 73-year-old Australian farmer gave new meaning to the phrase “hold your head up” after he had a motorcycle accident and fractured his neck.
He literally held his head up by his hair until he reached his home and called an ambulance.
The farmer, identified only as Jim, was reportedly leaning over the front of his motorcycle looking for hatching grasshoppers on Dec. 8 when he hit a hole and toppled forward.
The crash sent him over the handlebars.
Jim said he knew something was not right the moment he got to his feet.
“I knew there was something seriously wrong,” he told 3AW, the U.K. Daily Mail reported.
“My head wouldn’t stay up… The pain, it hurt so much, so I just held it up by my hair,” the farmer explained.
Jim reportedly rode almost half a mile to his home, where he called for help.
That is what you call a painful ride.
Doctors confirmed that Jim fractured two vertebrae near the top of his spine.
Gerald Quan, head of spinal surgery at The Austin Hospital, said Jim was “very lucky” that he did not damage the nerves that are located in his spine, stuff.co.nz reported.
Because those nerves were not damaged, Jim was able to move and seek help.
However, doing so couldn’t have been very easy. Quan said Jim must have felt like his head was going to fall off.
“If you imagine the foundations of a house with bricks, you’ve cracked through the mortar or the bricks so even though you have muscles or things holding you up, you’re relying on [muscles] to hold you up, rather than the structure itself of the bone and the vertebrae,” Quan explained.
Jim is reportedly wearing what is called a “halo brace” as he recovers, a device that is attached to his skull with four bolts.
Thankfully, Jim is expected to make a complete recovery.
H/T The Age
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