Man faced unthinkable choice when he had to choose whether to cut off his own arm to save his life

Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions which some readers may find distressing.

Could you cut off your own arm if it meant saving your life?

It's the type of question you might ask your friends when you're trying to keep each other entertained on a long road trip, but for South Carolina man Sampson Parker, it was a very real dilemma.

Parker's ordeal began in September 2007, when he was harvesting corn and realized some of the stalks had got stuck in a set of rollers on his old corn picker.

Sampson Parker had been trying to clear out his machine when he got stuck (BBC)

Parker reached into the machine to try and pull the stalks out, but disaster struck when the rollers caught hold of his glove - then his hand.

On an isolated field in South Carolina, no one could hear Parker as he yelled for help, and he was left struggling for more than an hour to try and yank his hand free of the machine.

Eventually, he managed to reach an iron bar which he jammed into the machine to stop the rollers.

Knowing there was likely no other way out, Parker pulled out a small pocketknife and began trying to cut off his fingers to free his hand. But before he had chance to make any real progress, he noticed that the machine grinding against the iron bar he'd jammed into it was letting off sparks.

Then, he saw that the sparks had set the ground on fire.

Recalling the terrifying ordeal to a local NBC affiliate, he said: “My skin was melting. It was dripping off my arm like melting plastic.”

Parker had no choice - he had to cut off his arm, or risk being burned alive.

“I told myself, I’m not going to die here,” he told the Today show. “I kept fighting, kept praying.”

Parker sunk the knife into his arm and began cutting - surprisingly only really feeling pain when he hit the nerves. He might have been struck by shock, but Parker believes the roar of the fire helped him stay focused.

“If it hadn’t been for the fire, I would have lost my life,” he explained.

Parker has since been fitted with a prosthetic (BBC)

Obviously, there was one major issue - Parker's pocketknife couldn't cut through bone. Instead, he had to force himself to drop on to the ground and use his own weight to break the bone, in turn freeing him from the machine.

Just as he got back to his feet, one of the machine's tires exploded and blew Parker backwards. He managed to get up and started running, with 'blood spurting from [his] arm', until he got to his pickup truck and drove out to the highway, where, after a lot of people ignored him, he eventually managed to flag down another driver.

Parker had lost a lot of blood, but he managed to hold out until a rescue helicopter came and took him to hospital, where he spent three weeks recovering.

He's since had a prosthetic arm fitted, and it wasn't long before he was back his job, supervising an $80 million highway construction project.

Looking back, he told NBC his ordeal 'wasn't the corn picker's fault', saying: “It’s just a mistake I made by what I did. I stuck my hand where I shouldn't.”