Loren Schauers was 18, on a job he had barely been trained for, when the ground at the edge of a Montana highway bridge gave way. The forklift tipped. He tried to jump. His leg caught in the seatbelt. The machine rolled about 50 feet down a steep drop and landed on him. Four tons. Thirty minutes. He never lost consciousness. He saw his right forearm blown apart and everything from the hips down crushed.

Rescuers pulled him out. Surgeons first hoped they could save more. Scans showed the pelvis had crumbled. The only operation that would keep him alive was a hemicorporectomy: removal of the entire body below the waist—legs, pelvis, genitalia, bladder, rectum. His right forearm had to go as well. Without the surgery he would die. With it he would wake up half the person he had been that morning.

His girlfriend, Sabia Reiche, was 20. Doctors told her he would not make it. She said goodbye more than once. When they woke him so he could choose, Loren looked at them and chose to live. “It wasn’t a hard choice,” he said later. “It was living or dying.” She told him she was staying. They married in 2021. She became his full-time caregiver.

What happened next surprised even the medical team. Recovery moved faster than expected. Within months he was sitting up. By six months he could get himself ready in the morning before she woke—emptying bags, brushing his teeth. He went from nearly six feet tall to about 2 feet 8 inches. Organs had to be rearranged so a colostomy and urinary diversions could function. Nothing sits where it used to. Infections remain a constant threat. Pain never fully left.

They started filming anyway. Not a highlight reel—the transfers, the appointments, the quiet evenings, the work of remaining a couple after a catastrophe. Loren has said he wanted people to see that a life can still be full after something this violent. Viewers found them. In 2026 he appeared on TLC’s One Day in My Body. He talks about purpose, about love that did not walk away, and about refusing to treat the accident as the last page.

It is not a fairy tale. Health crises keep arriving. Independence has hard limits. Strangers ask invasive questions. What holds is simpler than the surgery that saved him: he decided to stay, she decided to stay with him, and they keep showing what that looks like when the body you had is gone.

Sources

New York Post interviews with Loren Schauers and Sabia Reiche (2022, 2026)
The Sun / The US Sun reporting on the 2019 accident and later updates
7NEWS Australia account of the crash and hemicorporectomy
Express / Daily Express features tied to the TLC series