Whatever happened to the kid who had his arms ripped off in a 1992 farm accident?

It’s pretty clear John Thompson is a guy who doesn’t get rattled by much. But today his cat, Toby, is getting on his last nerve.

But Toby’s interruptions are small potatoes for this 47-year-old survivor — a man who, 29 years ago today, had both his arms ripped off in a farm accident. The subsequent surgery to reattach his arms garnered international media attention — all a little daunting for the then 18-year-old farm kid from Hurdsfield, North Dakota.

The media attention has long since quieted down. So what is Thompson up to now? Have the years been good to him? Can he still use his arms? Were there drawbacks to his instant fame? And what brings him joy today?

On Saturday morning, Jan. 11, 1992, Thompson was unloading pig feed with a grain auger and playing with the dog when he somehow got too close to the power takeoff shaft (PTO), which didn’t have a safety shield on it.

“My shirt wasn’t tucked in, and they figure my shirt got wrapped up in the PTO shaft. And yeah, I still remember spinning on the shaft,” he said.

Thompson blacked out and awoke to his dog licking his face and the realization that his arms were gone.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” he recalled. “I’m sitting there trying to figure out how to get up. Then I just put my back against the tractor tire and pushed myself up.”

Thompson says at that point he just kind of “shut down”. No one else was home, so he walked 100 yards to the house to call for help — turning the doorknob with his mouth to get inside and using a pencil to dial the phone. Then he sat in the bathtub to prevent blood from getting on his mom’s new carpet.

He says the only pain he really felt was when the exposed nerve hanging down his right side knocked against something. But he was starting to get dizzy.

“I was bleeding out,” he said. “By the time I got to the hospital, they said ‘You shouldn’t be alive because there’s no blood in you.’”

Despite the dire situation that day in the emergency room, Thompson remembers carrying on normal conversations with people, worrying that he left the tractor running, and even getting angry at the medical staff for cutting off his brand new cowboy boots.

He was still fuming about his wrecked boots, when he noticed the staff carrying a trash bag.

“They laid it beside me on a table, and they pulled my arms out of it. As I’m laying on my bed in the emergency room, my arms are laying a couple of feet from my head,” he said.

Thompson and his arms were eventually loaded onto a plane for Minneapolis where the arms would be reattached. He remembers the trip well. It was his first time on a real plane, and he argued with the crew to let him sit up so he could look out the window. But then he remembers telling the crew how cold his arms were.

“The crew member was like, ‘John, you don’t have your arms anymore.’ I said, ‘I know, but they’re freezing,’ and he said, ‘Well they’re on ice in the front of the plane,’” Thompson said with a chuckle.

He can look back and laugh now at some of it, but it was a harrowing ordeal. After getting his arms reattached by surgeon Dr. Allen Van Beek (a 1966 University of North Dakota graduate) at North Memorial Hospital in Robbinsdale, Minn., he was put into a coma for four weeks so he could heal. Thompson nearly died of a blood infection and endured more surgery and intensive rehabilitation.

Following his high school graduation, Thompson attended the University of Minnesota for a while, but he says it was “not a good experience.” He started getting busier with speaking engagements around the country and donated proceeds to United Blood Services because blood donations saved his life. In 2002, on the 10th anniversary of his accident, he wrote a book entitled, “Home in One Piece”.

The book sold well, and for a while, he was in discussions with actor Victoria Principal about turning it into a screenplay and film. As he approaches the 30th anniversary of the accident next year, he’s hoping to revisit the idea of the screenplay and add more detail to the book’s story.

“When I first wrote it, times were much different. They’d say ‘You can’t say this, you can’t say that. This is gonna make you look bad.’ So we left a lot of stuff out of it. I’d like to write a more open book.”

Thompson could write at length about the tough times. He says while he’ll get the occasional hug from someone who recognizes him and remembers his story, he’s also been taken advantage of and harassed by people.