“I didn’t really know what to do, but I knew with sharks you have to hit them in the nose to get them off you, and I couldn’t bring myself to hit him in the nose,” the 17-year-old told CNN. “So I just started touching it in the face and then poked its eyes and tried to pull it off me with my fingers and then it bit my hand.”
She screamed for help and her brother, Rhett Willingham, a firefighter/emergency physician, heeded the call.
“I heard her make a noise like something startled her,” he said. “I sat down and looked and didn’t see her. Then it came out of the water and I saw the shark, the blood and all that, and then I swam over there and took (the shark) down.”
After fighting off the shark, Willingham pulled his sister into another boat, applied a tourniquet to her leg to stop the blood loss and brought her back to land as quickly as possible, he said.
The siblings explained the harrowing moments in an interview with CNN Monday from their bedside at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, where Addison was being treated for her injuries.
The Taylor County Sheriff’s Office confirmed in a statement on social media that the young man “suffered a shark bite while wading near Grassy Island in water approximately five feet deep.” The service said the shark was about 9 feet long.
The bite left “devastating soft tissue damage in her right leg,” according to a statement from Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare (TMH). “The TMH trauma team stabilized her and the trauma surgeon performed emergency surgery to restore blood flow to her leg,” hospital officials said Friday.
Injuries seem to have done little to dampen Addison’s spirits. Surrounded by stuffed toy sharks in her hospital bed, the teenager appeared upbeat even as she said her leg had to be amputated above the knee on Tuesday.
“It will make it a lot easier in the end,” she said. “I’m excited about it, to be honest. I’m tired of sitting in bed all the time.”
“Anyone who knows me knows that I take the humor in everything, so yeah, I just like stuffed sharks,” she said. “I think it’s funny. I’m just making light of the situation.”
In a Facebook post, her father said she was in good spirits and “making jokes about beating the shark.”
“The first thing he asked for was a Wendy’s frosty,” he said. “She’s been through more than I could ever imagine, but she’s a trooper. Please pray for her and the difficulty of her days ahead. She’s not out of the woods by any means, but she’s alive and that’s what’s most important to us.”
Willingham told CNN that the experience was “definitely not something I ever expected to watch, but to see her now and how positive she is, it’s good to see.”
As for her future plans, Addison doesn’t disappoint: She plans to get back in the water once she recovers.
“I mean, a shark has always been there, it just happened to attack me the other day,” she said. “I lived 17 years without a shark attack. I’m good to go back.’
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