CANBERRA, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- An Australian man has undergone plastic surgery after being attacked by a kangaroo he thought to be dead.
Billy Willox had the ligaments and skin tissue around his eyes torn by an eastern grey kangaroo on the side of a Canberra road after he stopped to check the animal's pouch on Sept. 11 for a joey assuming the kangaroo had been struck by a car and killed.
"All of a sudden, it just got up," Willox told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) of the kangaroo on Thursday.
"Before I knew it, it had gone for my eyes. It was very, very quick.
"I just couldn't move away from it."
Willox, a bus driver who was on his way to work at the time of the attack, kicked the marsupial away and managed to drive home despite blood pouring from his eyes.
Kerrie Venables, Willox's partner, described the scene upon his return home as "gruesome".
"When he turned around, all I could see was two split eyes," she said.
"It was just so gruesome and he just kept trying to wash them out."
He was rushed to Canberra Hospital where he underwent plastic surgery and received a tetanus shot.
Joel Patterson, a park ranger in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), said it was common for injured animals to appear to rise from the dead as a "last hurrah".
"They can spring quite quickly into action and cause quite a bit of damage," he said.
"I've seen it often with kangaroos that have sustained quite severe injuries; they have this last surge where they just spring to life a little bit."
