Word: sharked
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shark attack had severed Jessie's arm 4 in. below the shoulder. Vance tied towels into tourniquets and used T shirts to cover the bone sticking out from the stump, slowing the loss of what little blood was left in the boy's body. Breathless but calm, Vance used his cell phone to call the 911 dispatcher, "The right arm and right leg are gone... Completely gone. He's lost a lot of blood... He wasn't breathing, and he didn't have a pulse a minute ago... We need a life helicopter out here or something like that...
Before they landed, the crew of the chopper from Baptist Hospital saw the shark on the beach, its gray body against the white sand. Once the chopper touched down, they discovered that Jessie had basically been drained of blood, the worst situation in a trauma. In such situations, fewer than 1% of victims survive. No medication can help the heart. "There is nothing left to pump," says Greg Smith, an emergency-room physician who had hopped onto the helicopter when he heard there had been a shark attack. "You've basically run the pump dry." The medics could well have...
...shark was still thrashing on the beach. Jared Klein, a National Park Service ranger, wondered whether the arm was in the water or in the shark's mouth. At a paramedic's suggestion, he took his expandable baton and pried apart the bull shark's jaws. There it was. But, says Klein, "the arm was too far in the mouth to remove it," particularly with the shark still in violent convulsion. He asked the crowd to step back and shot the shark four times in the head. Then he opened its mouth with the baton, while Tony Thomas, a lifeguard...
...Juliet De Campos and microvascular surgeon Ian Rogers. The doctors were surprised by the neat tears in the muscles and tissues. "My God," Rogers told the others. "This is replantable!" In 16 years of reattaching arms, it was the cleanest cut Rogers had ever seen. "You never get a shark bite like that," says De Campos. Still, the doctors debated for nearly an hour before Rogers made the call to proceed...
...regain full use of his arm. And his right thigh lost half of its mass during the attack, so he will probably require a brace to walk--if he can walk. Or if he ever wakes up to tell his part of a tale of a boy and a shark on the wrong side of each other...