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#36
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02-07-2012, 05:15 PM
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Re: Ninja Fail
Dez Heal, 13, of Lynchburg, Va., was rushed to the hospital with a bamboo stick impaled his neck. Dez had been playing a Ninja game with friends and "decided to put the bamboo stick in the back of my shirt," he told ABC affiliate WSET-TV. "I guess when he jumped, the stick must have went forward," Nicholas Blencowe, Dez's friend and Ninja partner, told the station. "And when he hit the ground, the stick went in his neck." Dez's father, David Heal, described to WSET how the stick pierced Dez's neck and came out about about 3 inches behind his ear. Heal called 911. It might seem surprising, but when emergency room physicians see an impaling injury like Dez's, they don't rush to yank the piercing object out -- they leave it in as they take the time to appraise the patient. "It sounds counterintuitive, but it's important to leave the object in place," says Dr. Abi Mehrotra, assistant medical director at the University of North Carolina Department of Emergency Medicine. Even if an object is impaled in the eye, don't pull it out, he warns. "You don't know what the damage is to the structure underneath. The object may be stopping the bleeding that may be happening." Dr. Paul Pepe, chairman of emergency medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, agrees. " You don't pull it out. You do nothing" initially, he explained, because of the risk involved in extracting it. "If it is going through an artery, if you pull it out, the leak may explode," says Pepe. Luckily for Dez, the stick did not hit an artery. |