
Skylar Fish nearly lost his life after participanting in the duct tape challenge.
Before the age of man, there was the ice bucket challenge, where people would dump a bucket of freezing water on them while someone was filming them. And then there’s the duct tape challenge, where things get a little tricky. Duct taping your bud is probably not the best idea because he or she can get seriously injured.
- Skylar Fish is the first teen who got severely injured after playing the duct tape game;
- Participants have 3 minutes to free themselves from the layers of duct tape;
- Google-searching for “duct tape challenge” returns 239.000 results;
- Before the duct tape challenge was the choking game and the cinnamon challenge.
Picture this: Saturday evening, a little rendezvous with your closest buddies, some snacks and why, not, a beer or two. What can be more enticing than chatting with your buds, cracking some jokes or watching a dumb horror flick? Here’s an idea: not duct taping your friends.
We all heard about these online challenges. Maybe the most popular still remains the ice bucket challenge, where someone dumps a bucket of cold water over his dead. It’s clean, it’s quick and fun. And not to mention the fact that it is for a good cause. All the money collected from this little ding-dong goes directly to those who suffer from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).
While the ice bucket challenge is fun and noble, come to think of it, there are certainly other challenges which are less clean and potentially harmful. Everyone remembers the cinnamon challenge. Doesn’t ring a bell? Then let us go back a bit in time.
Several months ago, there were several viral clips on the internet, depicting people who tried to brave down a spoon full of freshly grounded cinnamon. They only had 3 minutes to complete the challenge and the whole performance was immortalized through the use of a hand-held camera.
Moving on, we have another “adorable” and “friendly” competition called the choking game, where teens would strangulate one another in order to get high. To phrase it in medical terms, cutting the oxygen supply to the brain creates a state called euphoria.
And now we have a totally new game called the duct tape challenge. Like all internet-borne trends, we can’t say for sure when it began or how it began (probably some teens with duct tape, beer and lots of imagination).
How’s the game played? Well, you sit down on a chair and someone comes and ties you to that chair using a whole roll of duct tape. The game’s goal is to magically transform yourself in a regular Harry Houdini and break free of the duct tape. You only have 3 minutes to complete the challenge and, of course, the whole performance is recorded on tape.
While it looks completely harmless, one kid from the United States nearly died after participating in the duct tape challenge. Skylar Fish, a fourteen-year-old, was more than willing to participate in the duct tape challenge. Instead of using a chair, his friends told him it would be funnier to wrap him up with duct tape while he was sitting upright.
The challenge began and Skylar struggled to free himself from the layers of duct tape. Well, long story made short, the teen from the US got to close to the window, tripped, hit his head on the frame and then landed on the concrete ground.
Due to this little ding-dong, Skylar suffered a cerebral aneurysm, because one of his eye sockets got crashed when he hit the concrete. Apart from developing a brain aneurysm, Skylar managed to rip all his hair and sustained severe damage to his left eye. The doctors who took over Skylar’s case used no less than 48 stitches in order to patch up Skylar’s bashed head.
Fortunately, after Skylar fell out the window, his friends and mother arrived just in time to help Skylar. His mother declared that by the time Skylar’s friends reached him, his son was already having severe seizures. Had it not been for his friends, Skylar’s would have choked to death with his own blood.
Bottom line idea is that duct tapping your buds is probably not the best idea you can come up with. Even though Skylar’s case was extreme, ripping off those layers of duct tape can leave behind some pretty nasty wounds not to mention sores.
What’s the doctor’s view on this challenge? Doctor Mark Newton, ER physicians stated that this kind of stunts can leave behind serious injuries, not to mention the fact that they are potentially deadly. Even the inoffensive ice bucket challenge can leave you with a bad case of cold or even pneumonia.
Here’s a clip to get you started on the ice bucket challenge.
Photo credits:vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net
I wrote something along these lines when a pass-out challenge was popular on facebook in 2014. As a mother of a boy who died playing the choking game in 2005, I am saddened that there is no surveillance of these posts on sites such as Youtube and facebook and that number of new, potentially harmful challenges seems to be increasing. https://rememberingcolin.com/more.html