13 YEAR OLD SURVIVES BEING IMPALED THOUGH HIS NECK!

A Virginia teen narrowly escaped death when a large bamboo spike he was playing with impaled him through the neck.

A shocking hospital-room photo showed 13-year-old Dez Heal hours after the accident, looking pale and shaken with a giant bamboo shoot stuck through his neck.

Heal and his buddies were pretending to be ninjas outside his house in Lynchburg, Va., last week when he put the stick down the back of his T-shirt, as if it was a sword, WSET television reported.

"I guess when he jumped, the stick must have went forward," Nicholas Blencowe, Heal's pal, told the station.

"And when he hit the ground, the stick went in his neck."

Heal's father, David Heal, said he heard his son's panicked screams.

When he looked outside, he was shocked to see his boy had been impaled.

"It entered right here on the right side, then came out about three inches back, just behind his ear," David Heal told WSET.

Heal called 911, and the teen was rushed to a local hospital and then transferred to University of Virginia Medical Center.

Luckily, the pole didn't hit an artery, and doctors at UVA spent five hours carefully removing it.

The teen was bandaged and sent home to recover. Doctors at UVA removed a drainage tube from his neck on Monday.

Health said he was feeling ok and laying off the ninja games for a while.

"I'm not playing as rough as I used to," he said.

News of the teen's close call has given new attention to impalement injuries, doctors said.

Emergency room docs warned any victims who suffer injuries like Heal's not to panic and yank the object out.

"It sounds counterintuitive, but it's important to leave the object in place," Dr. Abi Mehrotra, an emergency medicine expert at University of North Carolina, told ABC News.

"The object may be stopping the bleeding," he said.

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