Two weeks after British doctors warned that keeping cellphones and other metallic objects in your pocket can increase the amount of internal damage incurred if lightning strikes, a Colorado teenager was burned after he was struck by lightning while listening to music on his iPod.

Seventeen-year-old Jason Bunch was mowing his lawn and listening to Metallica when he was struck down by a bolt of lightning. Bunch managed to somehow get back inside the house, take off his shoes and burned T-shirt, and get into bed, where he awoke later to discover that he had vomited and that his ears were bleeding.

According to the Denver Post, the first thing that Bunch did upon waking was call his mom.

“Mom, I think I got hit by lightening,” he said.

Later, at the hospital, the teen called a friend to say that he wouldn’t be able to make it to bowling after all, and also a girl that he was to have a date with.

“I did not stand you up. I was struck by lightening,” he told her.

The insides of Bunch’s ears were burned and he lost some hearing, and he had burn marks in the outline of his earphones from his ears, down his right side to his hips where his iPod was.

British doctors recently warned in the British Medical Journal that carrying around metallic objects could increase the amount of internal damage sustained during lightning strikes by redirecting the normal flow of current over the body inward.

However, many lightning experts were skeptical, and one told LiveScience that the mechanism the doctors described didn’t seem plausible.

Bunch didn’t suffer serious internal damage, but he and his mother think the iPod acted as a lightning antenna. Gregory Stewart of the Lightning Reference Center told the Denver Post that it was probably just a freak accident though.

“There is no scientific evidence to show that lightning is ‘attracted’ to items like an iPod,” Stewart said. “However, if someone wearing earbuds is struck, current may travel along the wires into the ears.”