A 28-year-old man broke his neck and did it badly

A 28-year-old man living in Oklahoma tore a vertebral artery around his neck that dragged him into his brain, resulting in a stroke, KOCO News, a subsidiary of ABC, reported. According to the newspaper, Josh Hader of Guthrie, Oklahoma, he fractured the artery simply by cracking his neck.

"As soon as I heard pop, everything on the left is numb," Hader told KOCO. "I got up and tried to grab an ice pack in the fridge and I remember that I could not walk right."

Hader's father-in-law took him to the emergency room, where the doctors discovered that Hader had been lucky. "He could have formed more clot on this tear and suffered a stroke ending his life. He could have died, "Koco Vance McCollom, a Mercy hospital doctor, told KOCO.

But Hader was not completely unscathed. KOCO reports that a muscle attached to his eye has been weakened because the nerve has been injured. Hader had blurry, double vision and had to wear an eye patch for several days. He also had to use a walker for a few days and still has trouble walking. In addition, he had painful hiccups for a week and a half.

"If you want to burst your neck, do it rather from one side to the other. Do not twist it, "McCollom told KOCO," Every time you twist it, you risk tearing the ship, say that my hand is his head, I suspect he just turned it very sharp and lifted, clean and that's what really caught him.

This type of injury is not unheard of. A 2013 meta-study published in PLOS One revealed more than 700 cases of stroke badociated with spinal manipulation by chiropractic. And a 2011 case report described a 42-year-old woman with a torn vertebral artery who fractured her neck repeatedly. Fortunately, she survived.

"Twelve days before, [the patient] had had "the worst headache of his life", which started in the lower left cervical spine and spread to the left temporal region, "says the case study. "[She] stated that she would regularly handle or "slit" her neck to reduce neck pain. She reported doing this self-manipulation of her neck several times a day in recent years. "

Before being operated on, McCollum apologized to his wife, according to the doctor who operated on him. "He wanted to tell his wife that he was sorry to have jumped his neck," McCollom told KOCO. "His wife had told him," Do not break your head. You will cause a stroke. "