Teenager Explains How Electrocution Saved Her Life After Car Accident Left Her Dangling From a Power Line

An Idaho teenager attributes electrocution to saving her life after a 2021 car accident launched her into the air and left her dangling from a power line.

As she told Inside Edition, Littledike, then 16, was driving two of her friends home from looking at a sunset. She was “emotional” at the time, working through her first difficult breakup. “I can't remember what made me start crying again. It was so abrupt and happened so quickly,” she said of the crash.

"I overcorrected too far, and I went off the road on the right side," she explained. "My side of the vehicle hit the power pole, and we started flipping and rolling. We didn't have our seat belts. So when we were flipping, and I was the first one out, I wasn't on the ground. I was actually hanging in the power line by my broken leg.”

Littledike was horribly injured in the crash, but miraculously the power line saved her life. “In the process of getting thrown, my arm was actually torn off,” she explained. “[It] was hanging on by the skin on my back, and then my femur was snapped over the wire and hanging in front of my face.”

Despite by her own admission of "drowning" in the torrents of blood running down her body into her nose and mouth, Littledike managed to avoid bleeding out because the electricity from the telephone cable cautered her wounds.

“The main artery in my leg was pinched off by the power line, and then the main artery in my arm was actually cauterized when I got electrocuted," she recalled.

Littledike reported being “just uncomfortable” while hanging from the wire and was unaware of any injuries she might have. The teen hung from the wire for an hour before rescue attempts began. She remembers a firefighter grabbing her leg to take it out of the wire.

"They put the tourniquet on and had to take my bone back off the wire," she said. "And they said I screamed. And then, once I hit the stretcher, it was silent."

“It's even hard for me to wrap my mind around it," she added.

Littledike has amassed a substantial social media following since the accident, answering questions and recounting events with admirable humor and honesty. In one video, she did her best to explain her singular predicament.

Littledike was transported to the University of Utah’s medical center with a broken finger, humerus bone, clavicle, and brachial plexus injury. Doctors tried repeatedly to save her leg, but after five separate surgeries, the decision was made to amputate.

“They tried taking it at my knee, through my knee,” she explained. “My leg just kept rotting because the bone was broken so high up. Every other day, they were going in and taking more leg. And to go under surgery, over and over and over, to get more and more leg cut off. They'd finally just cut it off at the bone.”

Littledike’s friends were also injured in the car accident, but both made full recoveries and blessedly didn’t lose any limbs. Although she admits the accident and her recovery was an incredibly dark time in her life, putting an end to her dreams of being a soccer star and complicating her senior year of high school, Littledike contends she’s ultimately in a better place because of it.

“Before my accident, I struggled with mental health. I wanted to commit suicide," she revealed. "I did not ever really plan my future because I didn't think there was going to be one. I wasn't happy. But now, look at me. I'm in a whole different, harder situation, but I'm so much happier.”