WARNING: The photos and injuries described below are some serious body-horror shit, so steel yourself or turn away now.
We all know not to wear headphones when we’re cycling, but after seeing these images, I’m starting to think it might be best if we all just gave up wearing them altogether.
A 16-year-old practising jumps on his motorbike has had his throat slashed almost to the trachea by the headphones he was wearing, after his bike spun out of control and collided with a barbed wire fence.
Bradley Willoughby, from the Far North Queensland town of Ravenshoe, damaged the throttle of his bike after landing heavily. The bike then sped into the barbed wire fence, tearing up his abdomen. The fence also caught the end of Willhoughby’s headphones, which he was wearing inside his helmet, and pulled the wire across his throat.
“No one realises, but inside the headphone cord is fine copper wire which has cut through some of the muscle. He is very lucky he didn’t cut his trachea,” said his mother, Angie Willoughby.
“None of us thought earphones could be so dangerous. His father pulled the earphones out from inside the cut in his throat.”
Willoughby is currently in Cairns Hospital awaiting surgery for a badly broken and dislocated ankle. His neck wound needed stitches, and will hopefully end up as nothing more than the source of many tall tales about getting nearly beheaded.
In the mean time, we’ll say it again: headphones and any means of perambulation aside from walking (slowly and carefully) DO NOT MIX.
Source and image: Cairns Post.
