A teenage Texas farmer has been left with life-changing injuries after he was electrocuted while riding his tractor in a near-fatal accident.
Braycin Parrish, 17, began learning how to farm at a very young age and has since spent his entire life working on a field.
But on October 2, while he was harvesting peanuts aboard his tractor, the buggy came in contact with an electrical line – leaving him shocked and on fire.
‘I went and got on the tractor and went to dump it in the semi-trailer,’ Braycin told KWTX while still in hospital.
‘I guess there was a high line above it and I went to dump it over and the buggy caught on fire and caught the tires on fire.
‘I got out and was going to unhook the buggy from the tractor and it was under electricity and I touched it and so it lit me up,’
The young teenager’s boss was nearby when the accident happened and found him face down in the dirt surrounded by flames.
He promptly called 911 and began performing CPR on the teenager before notifying Braycin’s father Blain about what had happened.
Blain was about 45 minutes away working at a sale barn in Gatesville and knew immediately he needed to get to his son.
He said: ‘[The boss] calls me and he’s screaming. I run outside because he never screams. He’s a quiet guy and he’s screaming and then… he said, “he’s alive. It’s not good”.
‘When he said there’s a big hole in him, I gave that pickup all she’d do.’
By the time Blain reached the scene, his son had started breathing again and was being loaded into a helicopter by emergency crews.
‘He was dead. For how many minutes? Only God knows. You hear about it and see it on TV and stuff, but it’s a whole different thing when it’s your kid laying there,’ Blain said.
Braycin was flown to the burn center at Parkland Health in Dallas where doctors discovered third-degree burns covering over 60 percent of his body and his left arm burned down to the bone.
‘It was all the way to the bone. Bone was black. It looked like a hotdog that you left on there for four days at 500 degrees. The bone was even black,’ Blain said.
In order to save his life, Braycin’s doctors had no choice but to amputate.
Blain grimly remembered: ‘There were two of them that sat right here in this office and said, “We’ve been here over 20 years and we’ve never seen anybody have a burn that bad or a blow out that bad that lived”.’
After a series of surgeries, Braycin remained unresponsive for about seven days until he miraculously began to came around while his dad and stepmom, Brandi, a nurse, played Zach Top’s ‘I Never Lie’.
‘We’re all sitting there talking and they were working on him, and Brandi said “look”,’ Blain said.
‘That was the first time we ever seen any lights come on. I think he was just telling us everything is going to be all right,’ Blain said.
After hearing about his accident and tremendous recovery, the music star sent a care package with autographed merchandise to Braycin in the hospital.
Since waking up, Braycin says that he could not have made it without the support of his family and believes that God is watching over him.
Describing his current pain as a four out of ten, he said: ‘God was there watching over me. If not, I think I would have been worse without God. Yeah, I don’t think I’d be alive without him.’
Talking about what he wants to do next, the young teenager says that he wants to get on a tractor as soon as he can.
‘I may have to change the way I do it or it may be a little slower, but I’ll get it done and I’ll learn how to make it faster if I need to.’
He was released from the hospital on November 29 but has a few more surgeries still planned.