"I figured [the surgeon] was messing with me, but he had to stop because everything was shaking." Ball Drop When a small
earthquake rattled the
New York City area and surrounding states on Friday morning,
Pennsylvania resident Justin Allen was lying down on an operating table getting a vasectomy. As The Guardian reports , the geological rumbling alarmed his surgeon enough to momentarily pause the procedure. "I thought maybe a train was passing by or it was just something that happens at that office, even when the doctor was like 'I think this is an earthquake,'" Allen told the news outlet. "I figured he was messing with me, but he had to stop because everything was shaking." Allen, who was under local local anesthesia at the time and hence was awake during the whole thing, told the Guardian he wasn't worried because his doctor had prepared him adequately on what to expect. "I really wasn’t worried because he had walked me through every step of the procedure, so it mostly felt like a brief speed bump and we were mostly just calm and laughing as the room shook," he said. Seismic Moment Afterwards, Allen went on the
Social Media platform X-formerly-Twitter to trumpet his unique experience. "A FUCKING EARTHQUAKE HAPPENED IN THE MIDDLE OF MY VASECTOMY," wrote Allen in a post that went viral . His wife Bridget followed up with photos of Allen posing in front of the urology office, quipping on X that "I need to add, as the wife of the patient, the only thing this was a 'sign' of was the fact that we should never ever ever have another child ever again... ever." The
United States Geological Survey (USGS) reports that the 4.8 magnitude earthquake occurred at 10:23 am, with the epicenter located near Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. Tremors were felt in locales as far flung as Boston and Philadelphia, lighting up social media with reports about the quake. New Jerseyans on social media were especially peeved that New Yorkers were getting the lion share of headlines, even though the epicenter was smack dab in the middle of the Garden State. "NJ experiencing the epicenter but watching NYC dominate the earthquake convo," one fretted . More on earthquakes: Scientists Say They Can Predict Earthquakes by Analyzing Tiny Changes in GPS Data