An arborist worker in Colorado, US, lost both his legs in an accident involving a wood chipper on his first day on the job.
John O’Neill, wearing a court-ordered electronic bracelet, grabbed a fishhook-shaped tree branch and threw it into the machine on his first day on the job in Longmont last September, reports the Denver Post.
The end of the branch caught on his electronic bracelet and pulled his leg into the rotating blades of the machine.
The man said it “took a minute before his colleagues realized what was happening” as he made calls for help.
“The pain was very intense, almost non-existent,” he told the media. “I knew I was in danger. I went very quickly from a fight for my leg to a fight for my life.”
It was finally a work colleague who took him out of the machine, just as the blade reached the middle of his thigh.
He was transported by helicopter to a hospital outside Denver, where he was pronounced “clinically dead,” he said, adding that his heart had stopped.
Doctors amputated both of John O’Neill’s legs above the knee.
“It’s a miracle that John is still with us and he’s fighting harder than ever,” his friend George Safir wrote in the GoFundMe.
