Life has several twists and turns, but on May 22, 2021, an Idaho teenager, Kennedy Littledike, who was 16 at the time had the worst twist of her life.
On that fateful day, Kennedy had gone to watch the sunset with two of her friends, Nakia Molina and Jacob Rasmussen. This was her way of clearing her mind as she had just broken up with her then-boyfriend. She had no idea her sad tales were just beginning.
On their way home from watching the sunset, Kennedy who was driving suddenly allowed her emotions to overcome her her when she started sobbing behind the wheel.
The car swerved toward the left side of the road, and she tried to make a quick correction before hitting a telephone pole. The three friends were ejected out of the car.
“I can’t remember what made me start crying again,” Littledike told a news outlet. “Everyone’s like, ‘You should have pulled over.’ Yeah, I would’ve. But it was so abrupt and happened so quickly.”
Kennedy was the first one who was ejected out of the vehicle. She was propelled 30 feet into the air, and as she fell, her femur caught the wire, and she was left hanging for about an hour until help came.
Her two friends were also wounded, Molina was knocked unconscious while Rasmussen was bleeding heavily when help came.
“In the process of getting thrown, my arm was actually torn off, was hanging on by the skin on my back, and then my femur was snapped over the wire and hanging in front of my face,” she told the outlet.
This would look like a very horrible situation with her hanging by the power line, however, it was this that saved her life. If she had fallen from that height, most likely she would not have made it out alive.
“A lot of people ask, ‘How did you not bleed out?’ Well, the main artery in my leg was pinched off by the power line, and then the main artery in my arm was actually cauterized when I got electrocuted.”
I recall being submerged in my own blood as it streamed from my leg, and my arm, and even entered my nose. I struggled to wipe it away, feeling as if I were being suffocated by the sheer volume.” She later recollected.
As the firefighters arrived to assist Littledike, she recalled the moment when one of her rescuers firmly grasped her leg, just as her “lifeless body” descended onto the stretcher.
“They swiftly applied a tourniquet and delicately removed my bone from the wire,” Littledike recounted. “I let out a scream,” she added. “Then, as soon as I was placed on the stretcher, an eerie silence enveloped me.”
Once she was down from the power line, she was flown to the University of Utah hospital where she had 21 different surgical procedures to fix her broken femur, a broken clavicle, a broken humerus, and a brachial plexus injury. The leg that caught the power line was so damaged that the doctors had to amputate it.
The extent of the injury forced the doctors to amputate the leg five times.
They attempted to take it at her knee, through her knee,” Littledike stated. Her leg continued to decay due to the high-up fracture, she explained. Every alternate day, they would perform surgeries to remove more of her leg. The cycle of going under the knife repeated relentlessly, as her leg was progressively amputated. Eventually, they resorted to severing it entirely at the bone.
Following the accident, Littledike’s perspective on life has taken a more optimistic turn, prompting her to share her story as a public speaker across various social media platforms. She has garnered a substantial following of over 382,000 followers on TikTok.
