TRAPPED FARMER CUTS OFF OWN LEG WITH PEN KNIFE!
He had to act fast or be ground to bits
HORRIFIED farmer Kurt Kaser had just minutes to live after his left foot got caught in a grain auger and the flesh-shredding revolving blade began pulling him in — threatening to chew him up into bloody bits.
“I stepped right in the damn thing. It grabbed ahold of me,” the 63-year-old Pender, Neb., resident recalls. “It just sucked my leg in and I was trying to pull it out, but it kept pulling.
“I remember thinking, ‘This ain’t good.’ ”
Kaser was alone loading corn, so there was no one to call for help. He also couldn’t find his cell phone.
Instead of panicking as the screw blade sucked him toward a grisly death, the corn, soybean and hog farmer realized he had only one chance to live.
He grabbed his pocket knife, opened the four-inch blade and began hacking off his leg below the knee.
The auger had already crunched through the bones but the foot was still attached by “clothing and skin,” he says. “I started cutting. It was happening so fast and it was bloody.”
Amazingly, he felt very little pain, just a “ping” as he sawed through nerve endings. He realized he was free when he “felt a funny feeling, maybe it was a tendon I cut. All at once it went, and it let me go.”
Unable to walk, he crawled 150 feet to an office and phoned his son — who is a volunteer with the local fire and rescue department — and “he comes flying out. I was laying on the floor there in that office.
“And he looked and he said, ‘You really screwed up, Dad.’ ”
Kaser was airlifted by helicopter to a hospital and a week later transferred to the Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals in Omaha.
He plans to return to farming after being fitted with a prosthetic leg.
He also admits he should have known better. Previously, he had some muscle in his right leg “chewed up” by an auger.
“I’m kind of disappointed in myself that I didn’t think of fixing that thing” by putting on a protective screen, he says. “But that’s why they call it accidents, I guess!”