Bizarre Hammock Accident Leaves Minnesota Woman Paralyzed

A Minnesota woman was left fighting for her life after a freak hammock accident that paralyzed her, reports said Saturday.

Over the Labour Day weekend, 25-year old Alyssa Pfannenstein was lying in a hammock with her boyfriend Justin Jansse when one of the trees on which her hammock was hanging snapped and came crashing down, hitting her in the back of the head. The couple was watching Pfannenstein’s four-year-old daughter play in a park near Bemidji when the 15-foot tree, which was rotten from the inside fell. Her neck broke due to the impact and she found herself unable to move, the New York Daily News reported.

“All of the sudden this big boom hit me in the back of the head,” Pfannenstein told CBS Minnesota. It was not clear if her boyfriend also suffered any injuries in the incident.

A GoFundMe page was created by the family to pay for Pfannenstein’s medical expenses. The description of the page said her spine suffered damage. “She was taken by ambulance to Bemidji Hospital then airlifted to HCMC (Hennepin County Medical Center) where she underwent extensive surgery to remove the bone fragments and repair the damage done to her spine. She is currently paralyzed from the C5 vertebrae down she is awake breathing on her own and in very good spirits. She has little mobility in her arms and that is it,” it read.

“It was surreal. At the moment, there was not even time to panic because it happened so quickly,” her boyfriend Janssen said, adding: “Her calmness calmed me and her daughter down and made us understand everything would be OK.”

The accident came as complete shock to the couple who did not know the tree was rotten on the inside. “People do it all the time, we’ve done it all the time, we are very adventurous,” Janssen said. “We didn’t expect something like this.”

“We just want to appreciate every miracle,” he added. “Accidents happen and we will get through this like anything else.”

Pfannenstein is set to enter a rehab facility to work on regaining mobility and strength, reports said.

In a similar incident reported in May, a Georgia teen, Joelle Dalgleish, died after a tree that was connected to the hammock she was resting in fell on her. When Dalgleish was taken to a hospital, her injuries included a fractured skull and spinal damage. Later reports indicated she might have been suffering from swelling in her brain. It was unclear what caused the tree to collapse and police ruled her death was an accident.

In another hammock accident last year, a 13-year-old girl from Des Moines, Iowa, died after a brick pillar fell on her as she jumped into a hammock at her family's home. One end of the hammock was attached to a tree next to the girl, Eren Sagun’s house, and the other end was held by a brick column light post near the driveway.