Florida woman saves husband after his leg was severed by boat propeller

PENSACOLA, Fla. — A Florida woman used her skills as a nurse to save her husband after his leg was severed when it was caught in a boat propeller earlier this month.

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Tammy Brown, of Perdido Key, and her husband were trying to dislodge their boat, which was stuck in the sand on an uninhabited island at the mouth of Pensacola Bay, on Oct. 16, the Pensacola News-Journal reported. She was at the boat’s steering wheel, pulling back on the throttle as her husband, Rob Brown, 55, was trying to dislodge the vessel, the newspaper reported.

That is when things went very wrong.

Rob Brown fell while moving the boat off Sand Island. His leg went underneath the boat and was severed in two by the boat’s propeller, the News-Journal reported.

“You got me!” Rob Brown yelled and kept repeating. “… You got me … You got me.”

“I said, ‘Baby we got this, we got this, calm down, we got this,’” Tammy Brown told WKRG.

Tammy Brown, a registered nurse, used a rope as a tourniquet to stop her husband’s bleeding, the television station reported.

“I had the leg just trying to hold the leg together and hold the tourniquet,” Tammy Brown told WKRG. “Talk to him. Try to keep him calm.”

After calling 911, Tammy Brown held the tourniquet for 40 minutes until the U.S. Coast Guard arrived, the News-Journal reported.

Rob Brown underwent five surgeries and has been moved out of the intensive care unit, WKRG reported. He will be fitted with a prosthetic leg, according to the television station.

“Buddy, I’ll tell you what. My wife saved my life,” Rob Brown told the News-Journal by telephone from his hospital bed. “You marry till death do you part and all of that and all the vows that you take, and then this brings a whole new meaning to unconditional love. I owe her my life and my everything.”

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