OMAHA, Neb. — A farmer in Nebraska had to take extreme measures to save his own life after getting stuck in a piece of equipment.
As he was moving corn into a bin, Kurt Kaser stepped into the hole of a hopper, getting his leg stuck in the equipment, KETV reported.
He was alone, trying to pull his leg out, and had no cellphone. The mechanism kept pulling his leg down.
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That’s when he made a difficult decision.
He still had his pocket knife.
"I had my pocket knife in my pocket. I said, 'The only way I'm getting out of here is to cut it off,' so I just started sawing at it," Kaser told the television station.
He felt every cut as he amputated his leg.
Farmer amputates own leg to save his life https://t.co/ziKcTRQvKj pic.twitter.com/xkrPf5U3xu
— KETV NewsWatch 7 (@KETV) May 14, 2019
"When I was cutting it, the nerve endings, I could feel, like, the ping every time I sawed around that pipe, and all at once it went and let me go and I got the heck out of there," Kaser told KETV.
He crawled to the nearest phone, 150 feet away and stayed conscious through the entire ordeal, even being loaded on a medical helicopter.
He has healed and gone through physical and occupational therapy with the goal of getting back to work.
"He told me his goal, basically, 'I need to get home and get back to what I was doing before,' which was farming," Dani Willey, Kaser's occupational therapist, told KETV.
Kaser was released from the rehabilitation center last week, but still has a way to go. He has more healing before he can get a prosthetic leg, KETV reported.
Cox Media Group