A woman has issued a desperate warning to Australians after her thumb was torn off in a freak lawnmower accident.
Krichelle Parkinson had almost finished mowing the lawn with her ride-on mower at her rural home in Seaham, in the Hunter Region of NSW, on Sunday afternoon when a snake blocked her path.
After turning off the lawnmower and removing the hose, Mrs. Parkinson jumped back on and was stopped again by a wire she had missed.
With the lawnmower running, she grabbed the wire that got caught in the mower’s blades, turned around and cut off the top half of her left thumb.
CCTV footage from Ms Parkinson’s home did not capture the horrific accident, but did show her clutching her hand to her chest and sobbing, shouting ‘find my fingers’.
With blood spurting everywhere, in shock and in immense pain, Mrs Parkinson feared she had lost several fingers.
‘At first I said to my partner, ‘My fingers are gone,’ because it felt like most of the damage was to my fingers themselves. But in retrospect it was because they were the only ones I had left,” Mrs Parkinson said Yahoo News.
Although it was possible to reattach the thumb, it could not be found despite desperate searches by her partner, 13-year-old son and emergency services.
Doctors were forced to cut off the remaining bone to perform a procedure that would at least give Ms. Parkinson some sense of sensation in her remaining “lump.”
The procedure left the mother in extreme pain, leading to more than 30 seizures and requiring her to recover “day by day.”
It is uncertain how much dexterity Ms Parkinson will have as the thumb is the most important part of gripping objects firmly and is essential in her work as a firefighter.
A mother from Seaham in the Hunter Region of NSW, Krichelle Parkinson (pictured), lost her left thumb in a horrific lawnmower accident on Sunday
Mrs Parkinson held a wire that got stuck in the lawn mower blades and within seconds she cut her thumb in half (photo, x-ray of Mrs Parkinson)
Her family showed off their sharp sense of humor in the hours after the incident by nicknamed her ‘Nubby’, while her sister and cousins sent pictures of themselves giving her a ‘thumbs up’.
Although Mrs Parkinson handles the situation as ‘if you don’t laugh, you will cry’, she also warns others about the speed at which the accident occurred.
“The most important thing is that even if you think you know what you’re doing, don’t lean off the mower or touch things on the grass while you’re moving,” she said.
“Stop, put the brakes on, stop the blades and then do it.”
Doctors were forced to cut off the remaining bone to perform a procedure that would at least give Ms. Parkinson some sense of sensation in her remaining “lump.”