When I Turn 6, Will I Have Real Arms?
September 09, 2001 | ASSOCIATED PRESS
MILNOR, N.D. — Parker Sebens plays as if he always played this way, as if he always lived a life without arms.
The 4-year-old moves his feet among the Legos, toy cars and plastic dinosaurs littering the family room floor around him. He squeezes Chewbacca and Darth Maul between his feet, then maneuvers the Star Wars figures in a midair wrestling match.
A space-jeep gets a push. A horned dinosaur is grasped and dropped.
Later, sitting on the kitchen floor, he picks up a tipped monster with his feet and stands it up.
"I know how to set this guy there now. Let me show you," he says, positioning the creature again. "Is that cool, Mom?"
Rene Sebens laughs at the question. Parker's face spreads into a wide, dimpled smile.
A thin white sleeve covers what's left of Parker's left arm, which ends inches below the elbow. His bare right arm--only a stump--hides inside the sleeve of his blue T-shirt.
His mother says Parker doesn't remember the accident last harvest, when a grain auger ripped his arms from his body, tearing the right into two pieces and mangling the left.
His easy play belies the life ahead of him. His independence will depend on the elbow his surgeon saved from the rampant infection that forced her to amputate the rest of his once-reattached arms.
How far he has to go is clear from what Mitch Sebens says are his son's goals for the next year: "To feed himself and go to the bathroom by himself by kindergarten."
Parker's surgeon, Dr. Jennifer Harrington, says she has heard people who suffered terrible injuries say that they were better off--not because of what happened, but because of what they were forced to learn about who they are, and what's important in their lives.
She struggles to find similar meaning in what happened to the young patient she calls an inspiration.
"With Parker...it's so hard," she says. "I do know that Parker has touched a lot of people, and I do know that Parker will help a lot of people.
"And maybe that's what he's supposed to do."
Like boys who grow up on a farm, Parker wanted to be with his father while he worked. On Sept. 18, he was playing with toy trucks in the bed of his father's pickup as Mitch Sebens ran an auger, loading wheat from bins onto a grain truck.
Sebens had warned Parker to stay away from the auger. He thought his son was safe in the pickup bed: The back gate was closed, and Parker had never climbed out on his own.
Sebens was moving away from the machine when a "funny noise" turned him around.
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