MACON, Ga. — Chad Wombles thought he was dying.

Sixteen days ago, a stranger had attacked him with a samurai sword outside a Wrightsville gas station. One swing of the blade severed his right hand completely. Another took his left thumb.

As a deputy rushed him to the hospital in a patrol vehicle, sirens wailing, Wombles watched blood soak through the makeshift tourniquet he'd fashioned from his jacket.

"I started feeling like this was probably fixing to be the end," Wombles said in his first on-camera interview since the Oct. 26 attack. "I had bled so much out that I thought I was fixing to probably at best pass out ... At best. Maybe not get back up."

In that moment, alone in the back seat of Deputy Ryan Hall's pickup truck, the 46-year-old Johnson County firefighter began to pray.

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