19-year-old crushed by forklift chooses to amputate bottom half of his body
Loren Schauers, a young laborer from Montana, was living an ordinary life — until September 2019, when everything changed in an instant.

Faced with a life-or-death decision, the courageous teenager made the unimaginable choice to have half of his body amputated, all to survive.

As per reports, 19-year-old Loren Schauers, of Great Falls, Montana, was in the process of driving a forklift truck across a bridge when it fell and plummeted 50-feet to the ground. The teenager was left trapped under the four-ton vehicle.

Loren, conscious the entire time, watched as his right arm was crushed and the bottom half of his body was pinned down by the truck.

As a result of his injuries, the 19-year-old was left with a heartbreaking decision: have the lower half of his body amputated, or face certain death.

Speaking to RTL 4, he said: “The doctors gave me a choice. The question was, do you want to live or die? Do you want to live with the situation now or die with the life you had?”

His girlfriend, Sabia, said goodbye to Loren six times while he was in hospital. Doctors repeatedly told her he wouldn’t live another day.

And yet he somehow managed to pull through. The pair, who had been together for 18 months at the time of the accident, got engaged to each other in 2020.

The choice

”It wasn’t a hard choice to have half of my body amputated – it was basically a choice of living or dying,” Loren explained.

”With Sabia assuring to stay by my side no matter what and all my immediate family being around me, it really wasn’t a hard choice for me!”

As mentioned, his accident took place back in September, 2019, when Loren was forced to drive along the edge of a bridge to accommodate passing cars.

The structure, however, crumbled beneath him, and though he tried to leap free of the truck, his leg got tangled in his seatbelt.

The vehicle rolled three times before landing on top of him, causing extensive injuries. Doctors tried to save his lower extremities, including his right hip, genitalia and left thigh, but his pelvis was simply too crushed.

They were also unable to save his sperm.