A young woman who was attacked by a shark off the coast of Texas lived to describe her horrifying ordeal, telling Fox 26 how she fought off the great beast.
The terrifying incident occurred while Oklahoma resident Damiana Humphrey was vacationing on the Galveston coast with her family. She was swimming in waist-deep water when her sister-in-law spotted “something tan” out of the corner of her eye. It turned out to be a shark about “four to five feet” in length.
“I looked down and there was a shark attached to my hand, so I guess I started punching it," Humphrey told the outlet. "That part is kind of blurry to me."
“We’re not surprised,” Humphrey’s family member said of the teen's reaction. “She’s one of the toughest girls we know.”
“As I was running, I thought I lost my hand," Humphrey continued. "I thought I was gonna be the next Soul Surfer,” she laughed, referring to the autobiography of surfer Bethany Hamilton, who infamously lost her arm in a shark attack.
Her family quickly pulled her from the water and summoned an ambulance, which took her to a local hospital. It was determined that the shark had severed four tendons in Humphrey’s hand, and she underwent emergency surgery to remedy the damage.
"They said I should make a full recovery with my physical therapy," she explained. "Honestly, I'm just glad it wasn't as bad as it could have been."
However, Humphrey won’t be able to use her hand for a number of weeks and as a result had to relinquish her care technician job for the summer. But it will undoubtedly make for a great story when she returns.
Galveston’s Beach Patrol Chief, Peter Davis, noted that attacks such as the one Humphrey suffered are particularly rare on the Texas coast. Despite seeing roughly eight million beach tourists yearly, the town only sees one shark attack reported every few years.
“It's really rare for us to have shark bites here in Galveston. I've worked a few of them in my career and the ones I've seen were shark bites, not attacks. Meaning it was a case of mistaken identity where they latched onto a human and swam away,” Davis explained. “It sounds like this may have been similar to that.”
Officials warn that you can ward off sharks by shuffling your feet across the ocean floor as you swim; and avoiding areas where other water sources, such as rivers, open up into the ocean. Should a shark attach itself to you, fight the shark off by punching it, or pushing up on its nose or sideways on its gills.
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