He Snapped A Picture Of His Kids Mowing The Lawn, Minutes Later He Was In The Emergency Room…

Despite warnings and safety designs, children are still being injured by lawnmowers at an “alarming” rate.

A Government survey shows that 54 percent of households with children under ten years of age do allow youngsters to ride on the lawn-mowing equipment. This extremely unsafe practice continues despite labels and warnings to the contrary by outdoor power equipment manufacturers.

Just like what happened in the summer of 2014, when a brotherly bond began to cement. At the center of their bond, though, is a terrible accident, one that they refuse to keep quiet about.

The boys’ father, Buddy Shoemaker, wants to teach his sons responsibility and the basic life skills they won’t learn in school. That includes mowing the lawn.

Six years apart, Drew and Grady Shoemaker are the kind of brothers that just fit together like puzzle pieces. When Drew, 16, lounges on the couch, with his arms, stretched across the top of the cushions, Grady fits right in below his big brother’s shoulder.

“That summer, we just started to become a lot more close,” said Drew.

That summer, it only seemed natural, to everyone in the family, that Grady would ride along with Drew when he completed his chore of cutting the grass with a riding lawnmower. On Aug. 17 of that summer, Drew and Grady were doing just that, and Buddy thought the image was cute enough to snap a picture to post to Facebook. “Drew teaching Grady how to mow the lawn,” he captioned the image.

It wasn’t the first time Buddy had posted such an image. The first time he did so, one of his friends, who owns a landscaping company, immediately responded with a warning. Buddy chose to dismiss the warning, though, thinking that kids can get hurt doing anything and that he had never heard of a child getting hurt by taking a ride on a mower.

However, within hours of posting the picture on Aug. 17, Buddy heard a scream and knew instinctively what had happened. Turning his head toward the sliding glass doors, he saw his older son running toward the house, and soon he saw his youngest son laying on the ground. Grady had fallen off the mower as it took a corner, and both of his feet went under the mower deck, where they were nearly amputated by the whirring blades.

That moment began a new reality for the Shoemaker family. A panicked drive to the emergency room, then an airlift to Boston Children’s Hospital, then weeks of worry while Grady underwent seven operations. Grady now has seven toes remaining between his two feet, and a reconstructed heel on one foot, but he now knows how fortunate he is that surgeons were able to repair and re-attach both of his feet.

On Aug. 29, Buddy returned to Facebook to tell the story. A loving father filled with regret and concern, and hope that other parents could avoid a similar horror, his post went viral and was shared more than 300,000 times. He received thousands of messages, from all over the world, from people who had their own stories to share. It took him months to read through them all.

Meanwhile, Grady was recovering. Amazingly, he was able to continue playing sports and played in a hockey game at the end of the 2014-2015 season – even scoring a goal in his first game back. Bauer Hockey, the sporting equipment manufacturer, even made a custom set of skates for him, the first non-NHL player to receive the company’s bespoke treatment.

“Obviously, he healed much faster than all of the doctors thought he would,” said Buddy.

The Shoemakers soon pivoted from recovery to advocacy. Earlier this year, the family traveled to Orlando, Florida to participate in the filming of a video titled “Limbs Matter” for the Amputee Coalition.

According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, 800 children are run over by riding mowers each year, and 600 of them will require amputation. In fact, lawnmowers are the most likely cause of limb loss for young children.

This incident should be a great reminder to all parents about the danger brought by lawnmowers to our kids. 

Source: Taphaps