A 33-year-old Colorado man is lucky to be alive after losing both his legs on his first day at his new job and “technically dying” in a freak accident involving a wood chipper. The Denver Post was reported.
On September 24, John O'Neill began his first day of work as a landscape designer. It was something of a new beginning for O'Neill, who previously struggled with addiction but recently left rehab and is in stable housing. At the time, O'Neill was also fitted with a court-ordered ankle monitor from a previous legal case.
Just 15 minutes into the job, O'Neill dropped a hook-shaped branch into a wood chipper, which the machine spun, allowing the hooked end of the branch to catch O'Neill's ankle monitor and pull it between the spinning blades. THE Comment was reported.
“Something happened in my brain and I realized that I was afraid of a lot more than losing my leg,” he recalled. “The pain was so bad – it was almost non-existent. I didn't really feel the pain as much as I knew I was in trouble. It went from a fight for my limbs to a fight for my life, very quickly.”
O'Neill watched helplessly as the blades tore through his boot, then his leg, then began working on his leg. “I was yelling for help, but everyone had earplugs,” she said. “It took a minute for my staff to realize what was going on.”
Finally, O'Neill was able to alert his staff, but not before the blades were thigh-high. “I looked down and I saw something that looked like in the movies,” O'Neill said of the mass of mangled bone, muscle and skin tissue left where his legs used to be.
“I didn't freak out, I just stayed calm,” O'Neill said, explaining that he grabbed a rope and made himself a tourniquet. “My co-worker said I was very cognitive about the whole thing.”
Ambulances were called, who transported the victim to a nearby hospital by helicopter. During the trip, O'Neill “technically died,” he recalled from his hospital bed. “My heart stopped,” he explained. Doctors amputated his leg and “basically replaced all the blood in my body.”
During the ordeal, O'Neill was sure he was going to die, but he was encouraged to fight through when he thought of his loved ones. “I thought about my mom and my friends and the people who look up to me and the people who needed me and the people who count on me and the people who taught me to fight,” she said.
When O'Neill woke up in the hospital after his blood transfusion, he didn't immediately remember what happened. After the incident slowly came back to him, he called his mother in New Jersey. Barbara O'Neill was so distraught by the news that she was hospitalized for three days, but in her second conversation with her son, she was relieved to see that he was “trying to be strong for everyone else.” He told her, “Mom, I'm going to be able to help so many people,” as a result of his accident.
“I think John has a kind of knack for the person in the room who looks a little intimidated, or someone who just looks like they could talk to someone.” They feel comfortable,” Barbara said of her son's ability to reach people. “He has a real heart for it.”
O'Neill plans to make prosthetics and continue his work with The Phoenix, a Denver non-profit that helps those struggling with addiction and helps maintain sobriety. “I feel like it's given me a bigger platform to help people recover from drugs and alcohol and help people recover from traumatic events,” O'Neill said. “I'm setting myself these goals to be there and I'm not going to listen to anyone who says it's impossible. I'm someone who can do things he's never done before.”