This guy got chopped in half by a forklift, you won’t believe what happened next.
This guy got chopped in half by a forklift, you won’t believe what happened next. Loren Schauers decided to seize life and has inspired many along the way. Not even a movie screenwriter would have dared to write such a shocking fictional story. The accident that changed Loren Schauers’s life in September 2019 was sudden and terrible. Loren, who was just 19 years old at the time, was doing his job as a road worker when the accident happened. The facts of the story are impressive. On the morning of the tragedy, Loren was aboard a forklift working on a bridge under renovation. The roadway was narrowed due to the road work, but this didn’t dissuade a car from approaching at high speed. Loren thought to bring his vehicle closer to the edge of the bridge to avoid being hit by the speeding car. However, the road surface, which was undergoing maintenance, gave way.
When he told the New York Post: “I tried staying on top of the forklift as much as I could as it rolled and then I was thrown from the forklift at the end of the hill once it finally landed my eyes were wide open and I saw the forklift come down and land on my hips in my right forearm”
Against the odds, the 50-foot fall didn’t kill him, nor did the 2,200-pound forklift which crushed half of his body. His then-girlfriend, now wife, Sabia, told the Sun: “We later found out that because the ground was so soft as Lauren’s team had just been moving it that’s how he ended up surviving”
It’s hard to find anything else soft in this story. It’s not difficult to imagine that some people might say that perhaps it would have been better that the fall had turned out to be fatal. Many New Zealanders spoke of a miracle in the aftermath of the event, but the blessing of survival as an abstract noun is miles away from what it really means to survive after such a hard blow from fate. Loren was given up for dead by the first medical team that saw him, and it was decided to transfer him to a hospice to provide appropriate palliative care in the final moments of his life. After he was transported by helicopter to Seattle, a new team of doctors proposed a desperate attempt to save him: a hemacorporectomy, that is to say, they amputated everything from his waist down, as well as his right forearm.
Loren remembers the moment of that choice with these words to the Sun: “It wasn’t a hard choice to have half of my body amputated it was basically a choice of living or dying”
Loren says it wasn’t a difficult decision. How so? For most of us in a situation of relative normalcy or of tolerable suffering, talking about a decision always involves a series of evaluations, comparisons, and even retractions. We take our time to decide because instinct can be a bad counselor. Loren didn’t decide in a hurry and without hesitation just because he was running out of time, but because he found himself face to face with that urgency that makes crystal clear the fact that life is an immeasurable gift. There was a moment of absolute lucidity in which Loren heard the word amputation and all the echoes of the life he still wanted to live.
Loren disproved gloomy predictions three times, including surviving the extreme surgery after the fall. The period of his rehabilitation overlapped with the outbreak of the pandemic, and being in a hospital with such a fragile body could have been dangerous. A year and a half of inpatient treatment had been planned for him, but after three and a half months, Loren was able to return home. His then-girlfriend, now wife, Sabia, has always been by his side, and her presence is an important source of the strength shown by Loren throughout his terrible story.
A year and a half after the accident, Loren faces the challenge of each day without lying about the fact that it’s hard. He decided to tell the story on social media showing the accomplishments and struggles of his condition. Thanks to prosthetics and other tools and forms of support created especially for his condition, he’ll be able to recover the ability to perform certain actions. In a video, he’s clearly satisfied as he manages to shovel snow in the yard aboard a special wheelchair. But it is a life also with panic attacks, uncontrolled muscle spasms, frequent infections, and hospitalization. The choice between life and death that he made at the crucial moment has been very difficult to sustain from rehabilitation onward. The decision to show the public through social media the bright and dark side of his days can be a means of perseverance, of not yielding to the clutches of despair. The dramatic incident happened while he was repairing a bridge. Now, Loren wants to finish building another bridge, speaking to an audience and showing the positive side of his severely disabled condition is a way to cultivate his vital support network relationships.
