Connecticut man who lost arm recounts boiler ordeal

Reporting from West Hartford, Conn. — 

Jonathan Metz had given up.

He had tried pulling his left arm out of his basement boiler, where it had become lodged while he was cleaning. He had tried screaming for help. When the arm became infected, after about 18 hours, he even tried cutting it off.

Nothing worked. And he realized he might die there on the blood-soaked basement floor.

Metz, 31, talked in public about his ordeal for the first time this week at the hospital where he underwent surgery. His voice hoarse and his face bathed in light from TV camera crews, he spoke matter-of-factly about his experience.

He said thoughts of his fiancee, his family, his friends and his dog buoyed him as he crouched in the dark basement, his partially amputated arm still stuck in the boiler. His friends’ concern about his absence from work and a softball game led to his rescue on June 9.

His arm could not be saved.

On June 7, after a day at his job, Metz decided he needed to get ready for an upcoming visit from his parents, who live in North Carolina.

He thought, “There’s got to be a chore I can knock off before I go to bed, to feel like I accomplished something.” He put on exercise shorts, stuck a late-night snack in the microwave and headed down to the hot basement to clean the boiler.

Metz pulled off a large panel and used a Shop-Vac and a brush to clean. But when he dropped something inside — either a vacuum accessory or the brush — he shoved his sweaty left arm between two heating fins “without really even thinking about it,” and it got stuck, he said.

“The next five to 10 minutes was sheer panic,” he said. He struggled, but that made it worse.

“It very quickly became apparent to me that I had a major problem,” he said.

Metz spent the next 12 hours in a semi-crouching position, screaming for help, but no one heard him.

He said he began to notice a smell that he realized was his rotting flesh.

“At that point, I had a decision to make,” he said.

He spent the next six hours trying to “psych myself up” for what he knew he had to do. Using his right arm and his mouth, he made a tourniquet out of his shirt and tied it around his left arm. Then he reached for power tool blades that were lying nearby and started cutting his arm, halfway between his left elbow and shoulder, he said. Metz is right-handed.

He got halfway through his arm when he hit either a vein or artery, he said, and “the amount of blood that came out of the wound became alarming,” he said. He tried making another tourniquet out of some cable.

He drifted in and out of consciousness and was extremely thirsty, he said. He leaned back on a pile of wood and had what he called a near-death experience.

“I had given up.”

But images of his beloved beagle, Portia; his fiancee, Melissa Mowder, who, like his parents, lives in North Carolina; and his family and friends crept into his mind.

He said he was able to muster up the strength to lunge and turn on a relief valve on the boiler that discharged “the most disgusting, orange water I have ever seen,” he said. “And yet it was the best-looking water I have ever seen.”

He took his flip-flop and scooped up some of the “hideous” water to his mouth.

“It was just enough to make me feel like, ‘Ok, here’s a way out of this.’ ” He lapped up the water whenever possible, and it sustained him until his rescue two days after he became trapped.

cdempsey@courant.com