A teenager who was left hanging by her broken leg on a power line has spoken out about the horrific experience.
Kennedy Littledike was just 16 when the accident happened, and it completely changed her life.
A girl from Idaho, U.S., was driving her car with two of her friends sitting in the passenger seats when a serious accident happened that changed everything.
Littledike had gone through a breakup with her boyfriend just two days prior to the accident and had been feeling down as a consequence.
Her friends thought it was time for her to leave the house.
They all agreed to take a trip to a nearby mountain, park at the base, and hike up to see the sunset, which they successfully did before heading back home.
While Littledike was driving back, tears started streaming down her face.
This made it hard for her to focus on the road. The car began to drift to the left, and when she tried to correct it, the vehicle flipped over and rolled multiple times.
The girls had not been wearing their seatbelts, so were all thrown out of the vehicle.
In an interview with Inside Edition, the now 19-year-old said: “I wasn't on the ground, I was actually hanging in the power line by my broken leg so all three of us were thrown out, and I was hanging up there.”
She explained that while she was being thrown from her car, her arm got ripped off and was just hanging by the skin on her back.
Littledike's thigh bone was broken over the wire and was dangling in front of her face.
The teenager shared that she didn't lose too much blood because the power line had pinched off the main artery in her leg, and the main artery in her arm got burned shut when she was electrocuted.
“I remember feeling like I was drowning in my own blood because it was pouring from my leg and my arm, and it was even going up my nose,” Littledike said.
She remembers the feeling of utter helplessness and she believed that it was the end for her.
The young woman also recalls getting a FaceTime call.
“I didn't have my phone, obviously,” Littledike says. “It was in the field, but I had imagined a call and it was a picture of God, the picture of him reaching his hand through the water.”
The teenager doesn't recall feeling any pain while she was stuck on the power line. Instead, she just felt really uncomfortable.
She stayed awake the whole time and could still talk to the people on the ground below her.
Littledike had been saying her back hurt: “My spine was leaking spinal fluid,” she remembered later, even though she didn't know exactly what was wrong with her at that moment.
It took the first responders an hour to rescue her because they had to turn off the power first.
Once they pulled her leg out of the wire, she was flown to the University of Utah for medical care.
“I can't remember if I said it in my mind or actually said it,” Littledike said of the time she lay in the stretcher after being rescued. “But I remember feeling like saying ‘thank you for trying to save my life but this is it for me', and I remember like closing my eyes and just, done.”
The teen broke her femur, her humerus bone and her clavicle. She also suffers from a brachial plexus injury: “My leg was shredded pretty bad from that wire.”
The doctors weren't able to save her leg, but they did their best to keep as much of it as they could to help her walk more easily.
In the end, Littledike had to undergo 21 surgeries and had 5 amputations in total.
At first, it was really tough for the 16-year-old to accept that her leg was gone.
She thought it meant she couldn't achieve many of her dreams, and she even refused to touch the part of her leg that was left.
However, once she got over the initial shock, Littledike started her recovery journey and learned how to live with one leg.
Now, she speaks publicly to inspire and help others.
“I would go through it all again just to feel that sense of accomplishment and know I made a difference in someone's life,” she shared.
The teen has since confessed that she once struggled with her mental health, but she's now much happier.
Littledike shares her story as a reminder of the importance of wearing a seatbelt.
