At 18, Loren Schauers was told that surviving might mean giving up everything below his waist. His answer was simple. He wanted to live.

On September 27, 2019, Schauers was working as a laborer for a construction crew on a bridge rehabilitation project on Highway 89 near Wilsall, Montana. He was asked to move a water barrier with a forklift. Traffic on the narrowed one-lane span pressed in. The machine edged onto unstable ground, tipped, and went over an embankment. He fell about 50 feet. The forklift came down on top of him.

He remained conscious. His pelvis and legs were crushed. His right forearm was destroyed. Rescue crews pulled him from under the machine after roughly 30 minutes. He was flown first to Bozeman, then to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Early attempts to salvage part of the lower body failed. The pelvis had crumbled. Infection and tissue death left one option that was almost as extreme as the injury itself: a hemicorporectomy — amputation of the body below the waist, transecting the lumbar spine and removing the legs, pelvis, genitalia, and much of the lower urinary and digestive tract. As of 2025, fewer than 80 such operations had been reported in the medical literature.

Doctors asked Schauers whether he wanted the surgery. He later said it was not a choice between keeping his body and losing it. It was a choice between living and dying. He agreed. The operation saved him. It also remade every ordinary act of life. He went from nearly six feet tall to about 2 feet 8 inches and roughly 90 pounds. Internal organs had to be repositioned. He lives with a colostomy and urinary diversion. Balance, transfers, skin care and infection risk became daily work. A prosthetic arm later replaced the destroyed forearm.

Beside him was Sabia Reiche, his girlfriend of about 18 months before the accident. She stayed through the ICU, the goodbyes she was told to say more than once, and the long rehabilitation. In February 2021 they married. She became his primary caregiver as well as his partner. Together they began posting their everyday life — the wheelchair transfers, the medical setbacks, the jokes, the dog, the ordinary evenings — first on social media and then on a YouTube channel that drew a large following. They did not pretend the life was easy. They showed what adaptation looks like when half the body is gone and the rest still has to be a life.

In April 2026, Schauers told that story on TLC’s One Day in My Body, in the premiere episode titled “Half Man/Half Incredible.” He said he wanted people in similar situations to see that a full life is still possible after something terrible — and that honesty required showing the hard days as well as the good ones.

The accident took more than half of Loren Schauers’s body. It did not take the decision to keep building a life with what remained.

If you were given that choice at 18, do you think you could have made the same one?

Sources

• New York Post, “Teen went from 6′ to 2’8″ after amputation below the waist” (April 15, 2026)
• People / Yahoo, exclusive clip and interview around the TLC premiere (April 2026)
• PrimeTimer and TLC listings for One Day in My Body, S1E1 “Half Man/Half Incredible” (April 15, 2026)