Inspiring 10-year-old girl says the 200 stitches due to a lawnmower blade mishap will make her look tough in basketball
Skylar Hedstrom may be only 10 years old, but the young girl has shown maturity beyond her years after she was involved in an accident with a lawnmower blade.
Skylar, of Hoffman, Minn., was watching her father, Brian Hedstrom, mow their lawn on June 9 when he ran over a tool. He told the St. Paul, Minn., Pioneer Press that he’s not a “pick-up-sticks-before-he-mows kind of guy,” but he certainly wishes he had been that day.
The tool caused the blade of the lawnmower to detach and fly backward, where it hit Skylar.
“My wife came running up to me, waving her arms and screaming, pointing to [Skylar],” Hedstrom said. “I jumped off, turned around and she was standing there, covered in blood. It was the scariest thing I’ve seen in my whole life.”
Hedstrom said he reached his daughter in what seemed to be one leap and was immediately on the ground holding her wound together. After he called 911, she was transported to a hospital in Alexandria, Minn., and then was transferred to Sanford Medical Center Fargo in North Dakota to see a specialized pediatric neurologist and cranial doctor.
But that ambulance ride is where Skylar’s winning personality stood out to her father.
Hedstrom wrote: “As I was in a dark ambulance on a 100-mile journey to Fargo I was trying to explain to her what a substantial facial scar may be like….. she looks at me through starry eyes and said… ‘Dad it really doesn’t matter what people look like on the outside anyway.’ I always tell her that I want her to be a better human than I am… I just checked that box…..”
In fact, after rolling her eyes at her dad who said that the scar might be an issue when she’s older and starts to flirt, she said it would probably make her look more intimidating on the basketball court.
The scar, a month later, looks to be healing wonderfully for the 10-year-old, even though, according to Hedstrom, her head had been glued back together. “That’s what he told me. [The doctor] said he glued it together,” he said.
All in all, despite the 200 stitches, Skylar said it felt like getting hit in the face with a dodgeball.
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