Skier stays remarkably calm despite having face impaled by tree branch

The one time I tried to ski it was on a school trip to the dry slopes at Beckton, East London, overlooking the A13 flyover, and I was immediately overcome by intense pain as my ankles buckles and my knees swelled and I spent most of the next hour and a half sat on the floor. 

This… is considerably worse than that. 

“Today I cut it a little too close to a tree while skiing,” wrote ski-bro Natty Hagood from Wyoming on his GoFundMe page, set up to pay for the whacking great hole that’s now in his lip. “The surgery to remove the stick will easily cost me over a thousand dollars…This was totally unplanned and sucks so if y'all would be so kind as to chip in for my medical expenses that would be sooo cool.”

While many of us are naturally skeptical of extreme sports hippies with names like Natty Hagood, the dude does seem to have an exceedingly chill look at life, even if he had to look at the world a little diagonally for a while to stop the branch tearing apart his lower face still further.

Whether his otherworldly chill was enhanced by what you used to call “the sweet, sweet sensimilla” when you were in university and tried to re-brand as someone who didn’t cough up blood every time they had a single drag of a bifter but Hagood told theIdaho State Journal: 

“I thought maybe my chinstrap got pushed up into my face, so I tried to brush it off and that’s when I felt the stick,” he said. “So, I shook left to right and saw the stick moving in my peripherals. I reached out and grabbed it and wiggled it before realizing it was pretty far in there.”

That was when Hagood had his first aha-moment. He said, “Holy crap, I just got impaled. And then I yelled over to Pete, ‘Hey look I got a new piercing.’”

Poor Pete.

“It was initially about a foot and half long,” Hagood said. “But I braced it against my cheek and snapped it down to about 6 inches. Ski patrol was all like, ‘You’re crazy, man.’”

ISJ also added: "Reduced to drinking beer from a straw, Hagood said the experience has left him with a bit of 'PTS-Tree'" which is very funny, to be fair.

Fifteen stitches and a bunch of sober-faced doctors going “...the fuck is wrong with these people?” later, Hagood set up his GoFundMe page called “Please help me pay for my new lip” and has nearly reached his $1,500 target. I certainly don’t feel bad asking people in the community to pitch in $10 so that I don’t have this crippling expense,” he said. 

May the spirit of Natty flow you through this week.