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This Teen Tried to Take the Perfect Selfie and Fell off a 50-Foot Bridge

"I broke my face a whole bunch."
Triston Bailey

Last November, a Texas teen climbed out onto the edge of a bridge to snag a quick selfie in front of the Dallas skyline—and wound up taking a terrifying fall that nearly killed him, CBS affiliate KTVT reports.

After a Dallas Stars hockey game last winter, 18-year-old Triston Bailey and his friends decided to sneak out onto the Margaret McDermott Bridge to take a few photos, because that's what the youths are doing these days, I guess.

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"You see [dangerous selfies] all over social media," Bailey said at a press conference, according to KTVT. "On Instagram and Facebook, people with really cool cameras. We wanted to have our own."

The next thing Bailey remembers is waking up in the hospital, he said.

"They say we stopped on the side of the bridge to take some pictures and that I was going over the concrete barriers," he continued. "They heard me scream and they thought I was joking."

He wasn't joking, unfortunately. The teen slipped off a concrete barrier and plunged 50 goddamn feet straight to the ground while his horrified friends watched from above. "I broke my pelvis, I had a rib fracture, a punctured lung," Bailey said. "I broke my face a whole bunch, and I had lacerations on my spleen."

He reportedly hit the ground so hard he left a mark in it, Wile E. Coyote-style, but somehow, Bailey survived the fall. If he'd have landed any differently, he could've been paralyzed—or killed.

"It’s amazing that he didn’t snap his neck," J Darryl Amos, a doctor at Methodist Dallas Hospital, told KTVT. "It’s amazing that he’s not a paraplegic—or broke his neck. It’s truly miraculous."

Miracle or no, Bailey still got pretty brutally messed up. He's spent the past four months recovering from his injuries, but, thankfully, he's on track to make a full recovery.

"I could have easily passed away that night," he said. "I could have easily been gone."

It's unclear whether Bailey ever actually got the selfie that night, but at least the guy was lucky enough to survive. It should go without saying, but apparently it needs to be said: Quit hanging off buildings and climbing on trains and swimming with goddamn sharks for a photo op. The only thing lamer than the internet is dying for it. Teens!

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