Boston Radio Host Mike Felger Airlifted Off Nantucket After Bike Accident

Boston sports radio host and Nantucket summer resident Mike Felger was airlifted off the island on Monday following a bicycle accident.

“I was in the hospital yesterday after getting airlifted off of Nantucket,” Felger told his co-hosts at the end of Tuesday's Felger & Mazz show on 98.5 FM. 

“I was riding my bike like an idiot on Saturday night, and I had a bike accident. I fell off my bike… It happened in a blur,“ Felger said on the show. ”I don’t even know exactly what happened or how it happened, but I cracked my neck on, I believe, the handlebars. I just sort of like buckled and fell into the handlebars, and bam!”

Felger, who leads the top-rated sports radio show in Boston with his co-hosts Tony Massarotti and Jim Murray, owns a home in the Nashaquisset neighborhood off Surfside Road. The Felger & Mazz team just did a live show from the Faregrounds Restaurant earlier this month to help raise money for the Marla Ceely Lamb Cancer Travel Fund.

“Big dumb Felger driving in the dark on little Nantucket streets, just lost my balance,” he said. “I’m a dope. I’m a big dummy. It was all on me.”

Felger did not go immediately to Nantucket Cottage Hospital (NCH) and instead went home for the night. But the next day, he said he awoke with pain in his neck. At the urging of his daughter, Felger went to the nearby emergency room at NCH, where he got a CT scan. The imaging revealed air pockets in his neck "in places they shouldn’t have been," he said, which could have indicated a more serious internal injury, such as a torn esophagus or windpipe.

“So I think I’m going to get the X-ray, clean bill of health and walk out of there, and they say ‘No, we found these things, and we gotta get you somewhere pretty quick,’ ” Felger told his co-hosts, who expressed genuine surprise at the revelation on-air. "They said the helicopter is on the way. 'Like, the helicopter is on the way? What do you mean the helicopter is on the way?' We don't know if you need surgery, but if you do, you want to be somewhere they can do it. And it's a small island hospital; they can't do every procedure, so they ship you out of there."

Felger was transferred to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he spent 12 to 18 hours and had a battery of tests, but physicians couldn't find any damage in his neck beyond the air pockets.

"Oh my god, am I lucky," he concluded. "Thanks to all the people who helped along the way in that hospital on Nantucket, those airlift guys, the Boston Medflight guys... At MGH, the best of the best. At the end of the day, it's all good."