With loss came lessons: After arms ripped off as a 3-year-old, Parker Sebens set to graduate
MILNOR, N.D.—The little boy who once pulled at the heartstrings of people in our region after his arms were severed in a grain auger on the family farm is all grown up and ready for college.
In one week, and nearly 15 years after the horrific accident that almost took his life, 18-year-old Parker Sebens of Milnor will graduate from high school.
“I’m really excited for him, he’s worked so hard,” said his dad, Mitch Sebens.
“I’ll just be the proudest mother ever,” said René Sebens.
For Parker, the milestone isn’t a big deal.
“I guess I’ve been through five siblings’ graduations, so it’s all old news now,” he said.
“I’m more excited for starting college than the actual graduation.”
That nonchalant attitude is evident when Parker reflects on his recovery, and everything he’s learned and accomplished.
“I wouldn’t say I’ve come that far because I’m where everybody else is at,” Parker said.
As René put together a scrapbook on Parker’s life for graduation day, she asked if he wanted a separate book about the accident.
“Nope, put it all together– it’s my life,” he said.
Parker Sebens. Dave Wallis / The Forum
Remembering the accident
That Parker Sebens is even here is a testament to his fortitude, family, friends and physicians.
On September 18, 2000, when his father’s attention was drawn away momentarily, a curious 3-year-old Parker wandered over to a running grain auger and fell, his arms landing on the powerful corkscrew-like mechanism.
In an instant, both arms were ripped from Parker’s small body.
René said earlier that day, she and Parker had picked hundreds of tomatoes for canning. But at the time of the accident, she was at work.
She got a call from someone who said Parker had been in an auger accident.
“I asked if he was still alive, dropped the phone and drove home (where) they were still trying to find his arms,” René said.
Despite the trauma, Parker remembers much of what happened afterward.
“I remember flying in the LifeFlight,” he said.
“He stayed awake all the way talking to me on the helicopter,” René said.
She relives it on the anniversary date each year. “Not the horror of it, but the thankfulness of it.”
Thankful, because of the quick medical care that saved Parker’s life—first in Fargo, then in the Twin Cities, where Dr. Jennifer Harrington and Dr. Allen Van Beek reattached his arms in a 13-hour surgery at North Memorial Medical Center in Robbinsdale.
“We had both arms and 10 pink fingers on for a number of days,” said Harrington, director of Plastic & Reconstructive Surgeons at North Memorial.
Contamination from grain in the wounds caused overwhelming infection and both arms had to be removed, but after recovering from that, Parker has hardly looked back.
‘All so normal’
Since meeting her young patient on that fateful day in 2000, Dr. Harrington has stayed in touch with the family and will be the keynote speaker at the graduation ceremony in Milnor on May 24.
“I love him like I would my kid,” Harrington said.
And she’s grateful for the “ordinary” aspects of Parker’s life. “Moving out, going to college, he has a girlfriend—it’s all so normal,” she said.
“He usually tries to do everything by himself and I give him credit for that,” said Josh Weber, 18, Parker’s classmate and best friend.
Parker’s mom credits his can-do attitude, in part, to a meeting she arranged between him and Anne Carlsen before her death in 2002.
Carlsen, founder of what is now the Anne Carlsen Center for Children in Jamestown, was born without forearms or lower legs.
René recalls the meeting between the 4-year-old Parker and Carlsen, then in her early 70s.
“She opened the door, he ran in and did a flip on her couch,” she said.
“Hey you, I’ve got my legs,” René recalled him blurting out. “She (Carlsen) just laughed and said, ‘I love him, he’s full of spunk.’ ”
Parker was recently fitted with new prosthetic arms that he plans to use when cooking or doing laundry in the apartment he will soon share with several friends.
But most times, he’ll go without the new arms, including when receiving his diploma on graduation day.
“I’ll accept it the way I always accept everything,” he told his mom.
Accident a ‘benefit’
Amazingly, Parker thinks of his accident as more of a benefit than a loss.
“Being an amputee, you gotta work a lot harder at everything, so I feel like it’s helped me with quite a few lessons along the way,” he said. “And, I do things just about as well as everybody else.”
That includes schoolwork, driving, playing video games and even texting, which he does with his mouth.
How does he manage to push the right buttons?
“Practice,” he said, with a wide smile.
This fall, Parker will attend Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he’ll study public relations and advertising. Along the way, he hopes to take up public speaking, which he got a taste of in high school, taking second place at the state speech tournament one year.
After college, Parker wants to get a real estate agent’s license.
“I just see how ready he is to go on and do the next big thing in life,” René said.
Through it all, those around him say he’s rarely been depressed, or even down.
“He’s always been the happiest one,” Mitch Sebens said of Parker, his three siblings and two step-siblings.
But don’t try to tell Parker that his ability to maneuver smoothly through life with no arms is a big deal.
“There’s nothing too special about me,” he said. “I’m just like everybody else in the world.”