A teenager who was left hanging by her broken leg on a power line has spoken out about the horrific experience.
Kennedy Littledike was 16 years old at the time of the accident that changed her life forever.
The teenager, from Idaho, U.S,. had been driving a car with her two friends in the passenger seats when the life-altering crash occurred.
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 decided she needed to get out of the house.
So the girls decided to drive to a nearby mountain, park the vehicle at the bottom, and go on a hike to catch the sunset, which they managed to do before starting their journey back home.
As Littledike was driving back, she began to cry behind the wheel.
This meant that she lost control of the vehicle. It started veering off to the left before an over-correction caused the car to flip and roll continuously.
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 said that, in the process of being thrown out of her car, her arm had torn off and was hanging on by the skin on her back.
Littledike’s femur was snapped over the wire and hanging in front of her face.
The teen explained that she didn’t bleed out because ‘the main artery on my leg was pinched off by the power line and my main artery in my arm was actually cauterized when I got electrocuted.”
“I remember I was drowning in my blood because it was running from my leg and my arm and it was going in 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 teen doesn’t remember feeling any pain while she was on the power line. Instead, she remembers feeling uncomfortable.
She never lost consciousness and was still able to communicate with the people below on the ground.
Littledike had been complaining of pain in her back: “My spine was leaking spinal fluid,” she later recalled although she wasn’t aware of the details of her injuries at the time.
It took first responders an hour to get her down as they had to shut the power off first.
After they grabbed her leg and took it out of the wire, she was flown to the University of Utah to receive medical treatment.
“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 could not save her leg, but tried to remove as little as possible so it would be easier for her to walk.
Ultimately, Littledike ended up having 21 surgeries and a total of 5 amputations.
It was incredibly difficult for the 16-year-old to have her leg removed at first.
She believed that it would mean she would never achieve many of the things she wanted to accomplish in her life and she initially refused to touch the remaining part of her leg.
But, after the shock subsided, Littledike proceeded to go through the recovery process and has now relearned how to function with one leg.
She has now become a public speaker to help others.
“I would go through it all again just to have that rewarding feeling and feeling like I made a difference in someone’s life,” she said.
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.
