Source : Perth Now news
A mum critically injured in a shark attack has broken her silence, revealing her terrifying fight for life when she thought she would never see her daughter again.
In an interview with 60 Minutes, Leah Stewart revealed she had just said goodbye to baby August on the sand before going for a swim on June 13 when, while in the water near shore and between the flags, she heard a woman behind her scream.
“I turned and there was a huge, huge fin behind her, it was massive,” Ms Stewart told the program.
She started swimming for shore, but stopped after a few strokes.
“I could feel movement in the water and I turned around and it was right there,” she said.
The shark slowly approached her with its mouth open until it was about “30 centimetres” from her face.
“I’ll never forget its face. It was huge and its teeth and its mouth was massive and its eyes, it’s just black little beady eyes, we were just looking face-to-face.
As she came face-to-face with the four-metre great white, Ms Stewart decided she would try to punch it.
Knowing she needed to protect her right hand, she used her left arm to strike at the shark before its jaws shredded her arm.
The shark then seized her thigh and pulled her under.
“When it was holding on to my leg I had the thought, ‘This is it. This is how I die’,” Ms Stewart said.
“Then I just thought of August and I thought, ‘She’s not going to have a mum. She’s going to grow up without a mum’, and I couldn’t handle that,” she said through tears.
“You ugly f—er, you are not taking me away from my daughter,” she said.
“I didn’t want her not to have a mum, so I just thought, ‘I’ve got to fight it. I’m going to do everything I can to be here’.
“I just started punching it over and over and over again, just punch, punch, punch.
“It was like fighting a dinosaur, it was so big. It was like punching a brick wall.”
The attack was the first at Coogee Beach in more than a century and left Ms Stewart critically injured.
As the chaos unfolded, Coogee Surf Life Saving Club then president Ben Heenan had just finished a swim with his partner, Doctor Kassandra McGregor, when they realised what had happened.
“(We) heard more intense screaming, splashing, and started seeing red in the water and knew that a shark attack had happened,” Mr Heenan told 60 Minutes.
He ran into the water with a board while Ms McGregor called triple-0.
Trauma specialist Dr Ian Ferguson was also nearby, having stopped for a coffee before taking his daughter to dance class.
Riot squad officers patrolling the beach joined the emergency response as well.
Mr Heenan helped bring Ms Stewart from the surf, putting her within reach of the strangers on the sand whose quick actions helped keep her alive.
Ms Stewart had lost so much blood that doctors could not find a vein, so Dr Ferguson drilled into the bone marrow of both shoulders to get fluids and later blood into her body, a procedure credited with saving her life.
“I was hopeful that she would survive to hospital, but I didn’t think it was a given at that point,” Dr Ferguson said.
The shark tore away the outside muscle of her left thigh. Her left arm was so badly damaged it had to be amputated. Her right hand was also severely injured, with serious nerve and tendon damage.
She was taken to hospital in an extremely dire condition.
Her family then spent 10 days waiting as she underwent 11 surgeries, including skin grafts to the large wound in her thigh. Even while in a coma, she remained trapped in the trauma of the attack.
“When I was in the coma, I was half present and I drift in and out of darkness to reliving the shark attack over and over again,” Ms Stewart said.
When she woke, she already knew she had lost her arm.
“I looked to them and I said, ‘Oh, I’m getting phantom pain’,” she said.
“They looked at me and they’re like, ‘What do you mean you’re getting phantom pain?’ and I just said, ‘because the shark took my arm’.”
Ms Stewart is now back on her feet and learning to use her injured hand again. Before leaving hospital, she wrote thank you cards to the people who saved her.
She also made clear how she wants to be remembered.
“I’m not a girl that got mauled on the beach,” she said.
“I’m the woman that punched the shark in the face.
“I’m the woman that fought like hell to be here, to be here for August, and it was the hardest thing in the world, but I fought my way out of there.”
