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 the lower half of his body amputated in order to survive.
As per reports, 19-year-old Loren Schauers of Great Falls, Montana, was driving a forklift across a bridge when it collapsed and fell 50 feet to the ground. He was left trapped beneath the four-ton vehicle.
Loren, conscious throughout the ordeal, watched as his right arm was crushed and the lower half of his body was pinned under the machine.
As a result of his injuries, the 19-year-old was left with a devastating choice: undergo a lower-body amputation 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 the hospital. Doctors repeatedly told her he would not survive another day.
And yet he somehow pulled through. The pair, who had been together for 18 months at the time of the accident, got engaged 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 she would 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, the accident took place in September 2019, when Loren was forced to drive along the edge of a bridge to allow passing cars.
However, the structure gave way beneath him, and although he tried to jump from the truck, his leg became tangled in his seatbelt.
The vehicle rolled three times before landing on top of him, causing severe injuries. Doctors attempted to save his lower extremities, including his right hip, genitalia, and left thigh, but his pelvis was too badly crushed.
They were also unable to preserve his sperm.
His girlfriend Sabia explained: “There were many heartfelt, teary, sad conversations within the first month of him being in hospital.
“The first time we said goodbye was before his surgery, but he still had his intubator in, so he was writing to us as he couldn’t talk.
“The night before his surgery, he wrote ‘I love you’ on a piece of paper, as it could have been our last night together. I still have that piece of paper today.
“The doctors would say he was going to die, we’d have a goodbye conversation, and then he wouldn’t die.
“It sucked, to put it bluntly, we hated it. His health was teasing us, like ‘haha we’re fine now but going to die soon so you’ll all be sad’, but then he lived.”
The road to recovery
Needless to say, Loren faced a recovery process of enormous proportions. Despite everything, he retained his determination to push through and defied doctors’ expectations.
Initially, he was told he would remain in hospital for at least 18 months, but he was discharged after just three, including four weeks in rehab.
Reflecting on his experience, Loren said: “My best advice to anyone going through something like this is that you can’t focus on the things you can’t have and you must live your life to the fullest with what you do have.”
Despite the challenges he has faced, Loren hasn’t allowed his condition to define him.
Together with Sabia, now his wife, they share their story on YouTube, where they have gained over 639,000 subscribers.
In their videos, the couple has been open about their plans for the future — including traveling and starting a family.
In one of his latest videos, Loren marked the five-year anniversary of the life-changing forklift accident, reflecting on how far he has come. He shared that while his pain is still present, it has become more manageable over time. Loren credited rehab techniques taught by his doctors for helping to “erase the phantom pain” he had experienced.
He added, “My pain is definitely more under control now, my health is a little wild and out of control.”
The question everyone keeps asking
As their YouTube channel has grown in popularity, the couple has faced increasingly intrusive questions about their personal lives, especially after Loren’s procedure — including questions about intimacy.
Sabia addressed one such question, telling The Daily Star: “A question we get repeatedly is, ‘How do we have s** and how do we become intimate?’”
She firmly responded, “That is a very personal question that we are never going to answer or allude to, as it’s very disrespectful. You wouldn’t ask a random couple on the street how they have s** and just because our life circumstances are different, it doesn’t give people the right to ask.”
Loren, however, has been open about other personal questions, such as how he uses the bathroom. In a YouTube Q&A, he explained:
“A colostomy, which is my colon pulled out of my body so I can poop. And I have bilateral nephrectomies, they’re tubes that go into my kidneys that drain my kidneys into bags so, therefore, that is how I poop, pee, and fart.”
According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, a colostomy is a surgical procedure that creates an opening in the large intestine to allow waste to exit the body.
In another Q&A, Loren was asked whether his friends still treat him the same way as before the accident, and whether he felt happy, surprised, or disappointed by any of them.
Loren admitted he felt “a little disappointed” by how some friends reacted.
“A couple of friends came out of the woodworks and have been really supportive, [others] totally reverted and have been reclusive,” he shared. “But it’s whatever to me, you know, I got Sabia, that’s all I need.”
Sabia agreed, saying, “Going through this together has definitely strengthened a lot of the aspects of our relationship.”
What a truly inspirational young man. It’s hard to imagine how a life-altering accident like this impacts someone, and in that sense Loren has shown remarkable bravery.
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