Lessons From a Tragic Tubing Accident
The Comeback Kid
How Eastern Carolina University’s third baseman Parker Byrd survived and thrived following a near-death experience.
Maybe next time,” was a common phrase 20-year-old third baseman Parker Byrd would use when a teammate would invite him and some of the other players to his family’s river house in Bath, North Carolina for a day on the water. Byrd finally agreed to dip his toes the weekend of July 22, 2022, along with a few teammates and his girlfriend at the time.
Friday on the water went off without a hitch and they’d planned on heading back to their East Carolina University campus the next morning. “I was supposed to take one of my teammates, Miles, back to Greenville,” Byrd says. “He was supposed to help an elderly couple move some furniture.” But when a text dismissed Miles’ service, the boys decided a second day on the water was in order.
It started off the same way the previous day had—Byrd and fellow third baseman Dixon Williams were out on an inner tube getting pulled across the water for a good half an hour before the driver really got determined to send the boys flying. The fall came soon after—Byrd and Williams laughed it off and started their swim back to the boat; Byrd was much closer to the boat than Dixon. While Byrd was swimming over and pulling on the tow line simultaneously, about 10 yards out, the boat’s driver put the boat in reverse to get closer to him. While the boat was moving toward Byrd, in what felt like the blink of an eye, the outboard began sucking Byrd and the line toward it, the prop slashing through both of his legs in the process. Byrd screamed in pain as he tried to push away from the prop with his left hand, which was quickly slashed as well.
The driver killed the engine and Miles pulled his shirt off and dove into the water. Williams, who was still drifting in the distance, realized something was wrong and swam over as fast as he could. Miles and Williams pulled the bloodied Byrd out of the water onto the deck of the old Sea Ray. The white deck was almost instantly stained crimson as blood spilled from his shredded flesh—Byrd was losing blood fast. With the line wrapped around the prop, their engine was out of commission, and the team began shouting frantically for a nearby boat to come and help.
The neighboring boat pulled up slowly as the team frantically tried explaining the situation. “We’ve got kids on board, so we can’t really help,” a member of the neighboring boat said, “but here’s a first-aid kit.” They tossed over the kit, and to everyone’s disbelief, motored away with nearly no other boaters in sight. “I don’t think they realized how serious this was,” Williams recalls, who recounts using a towel to try to force Byrd’s protruding muscle tissues back into his legs. The boys ripped their shirts and frantically wrapped makeshift tourniquets around Byrd’s blood-soaked legs, but it wasn’t enough to stabilize the injury. The boys were finally able to wave a second boat down a few minutes later—two couples who had decided to turn in early. They immediately helped Byrd onto their boat and brought him to shore. To Byrd’s fortune, one of the women on the other boat was a nurse. She applied proper tourniquets to Byrd’s leg as they went.
Upon reaching land, Byrd was quickly brought onto an -ambulance that took him to a hospital in Washington, North Carolina where he was transferred to a helicopter that airlifted him to ECU Health in Greenville. “They gave me every product for blood loss you could on that chopper,” Byrd recalls, whose blood pressure had dropped to 60 over 30. “I still almost died. I think if it had been even five minutes more that we waited to get medical help, I probably wouldn’t have made it.”
Byrd would spend the next three hours on the operating table while doctors tried to stanch his bleeding. They had to put him back under a second time in the days that followed, as they were initially unable to locate his sciatic nerve, which was necessary in their attempt to reconstruct his leg. Everything was going to be OK, they thought. “They told me after some extensive therapy, I’d be back on the field playing ball again,” Byrd says.
But on August 2, Byrd woke up with a cold, numb feeling in his right foot. It was pale and the swelling that had built up in the extremity since the accident wasn’t circulating back out. It stayed this way for two more days before the doctor determined it would need to be amputated. On August 4, Byrd’s right leg was removed below the knee.
The night following his surgery, as he laid in his hospital bed, Byrd took in the sight of his missing lower right leg. “Hey mom, I don’t think I’ll be able to play baseball again,” he said. “Why do you say that?” she asked. “There’s never been a Division 1 player to play with a prosthetic,” Byrd replied.
“Well, there always has to be at first, why can’t it be you?”
And that was all it took. As soon as he was out of the hospital it was straight to rehab and the baseball field. Though he’d lost 50 pounds during his hospital stay, hours of pool exercises and weight training would bring his strength bounding back. Utilizing a special sport prosthetic, Byrd was back to practicing on the field with his team the following fall. “Seeing Parker come back out like that, it was—it’s honestly unreal,” Williams says. “I mean, you have to watch it in person for yourself, because if you’ve ever seen how hard it is to field a baseball and then to watch him do it at the high level is probably the most impressive thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life.”
Parker went on to become the first Division 1 college baseball player to compete with an amputated leg this past February, landing a pinch hit on opening day. But what’s equally impressive is how fast Byrd got back to his other passion—boating. By the Summer of 2023, he was back on the water.
“Mentally it was just knowing that it wasn’t the boat’s fault, it was just a careless mistake that nobody intended to happen,” Byrd says. He not only operates boats again, but jet skis and goes tubing as well. With a background in competitive swimming, figuring out how to swim with one leg didn’t take long either—about a week. When he first ventured back out on an inner tube, Byrd says he was excited, but admits that when swimming back to the boat, he’s cautious.
“I know what it can do, now,” he says. If there’s a lesson that his experience taught him, Byrd simply says it’s to never have the boat in gear with people around. “Honestly, that day of my accident, the driver was trying to get closer to me but essentially, it wasn’t that far of a swim—either way, just be safe, make sure no one’s around you and just really follow boating 101.”
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