"I will never lie down when the president of this great country comes to shake my hand!" Thomas Gunderson wrote on Facebook following the visit.
As President Trump and the first lady visited survivors of the Las Vegas massacre in the hospital, Wednesday, one man showed unwavering patriotism, standing to greet the commander in chief despite taking a bullet to the leg.
Thomas Gunderson, 28, somehow found the strength to stand when the first lady walked into his hospital room.
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"Don’t get up,” Melania Trump told him.
When Trump walked into the room, he added: "This guy looks tough."
"I will never lie down when the president of this great country comes to shake my hand,” he later wrote on Facebook following the special visit.
Gunderson told Inside Edition that he was wounded while trying to save others.
He said that after gunfire broke out, he helped pull people over railings to safety. He said he and some other men noticed flashes of light coming from the Mandalay Bay and headed toward the hotel.
“In that moment, I had so much anger and zero fear to what he could do to me,” Gunderson said. “I felt like he couldn’t do anything to me. I wanted to kill him. That was my goal in going that way."
But as he headed toward the hotel, he was shot in the leg.
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"I hit the ground and within seconds, I was in puddles of blood," he said. "I was just so mad that this guy got me. It is not so much the emotions of getting shot, but the emotions that I could have done more.”
He was taken to safety by two off-duty police officers.
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