Long before I knew her, my wife was a volunteer EMT – Emergency Medical Technician – in the small town in southern Minnesota where she lived. Once when we were driving through that part of the country, she pointed out a certain low-hanging railroad overpass, and told me about a bizarre accident that had occurred there in her day. This was in the time when CB radios were all the rage, and a lot of people were having them installed in their cars, trucks, whatever, and some of them had real long antennas, often installed by people who didn't really know what they were doing. Once a van passed under that overpass with an extra-long whip antenna, much longer than it should have been. The beaded tip of the antenna caught in a bolt-hole in a girder overhead, and it snapped off at the bottom. The aerial had flexed so far that when it broke loose, it went flipping back the other way, and struck a rider on a motorcycle that happened to be following behind the van. The sharp, broken end of the antenna pierced the man through the throat. He was badly hurt, but he survived the accident. They airlifted him to an emergency hospital in the Twin Cities, where they treated his wound. He seemed to be recovering OK, but a week or so later, he developed an infection in the wound that was resistant to all the antibiotics they tried. He finally died of the infection. The particular bacterium that infected him was so rare that it didn't have a name until then, but a name finally caught on because of the accident. Maybe you've heard of it. It's called van-aerial disease.

(When my wife told me that tale, she had me believing it right up to the punch line. I've never yet been able to get her back for that.)