In December, 18-year-old Addison Bethea from Florida is expecting her first child. At their recent gender reveal party, she and her boyfriend Ashton served a watermelon in the shape of a friendly grinning shark.

A much more dangerous "conspecific" almost cost Bethea her life in June 2022. The teenager was seriously injured, losing large parts of her right leg and parts of a finger.

Bethea was snorkeling with her brother Rhett and friends off the coast of Florida in search of scallops when the shark attacked her. Shortly before the attack, the friends had joked about a shark attack to scare one of their companions, who was there for the first time. At first, she thought her brother was playing a trick on her when she felt the pull on her leg and was pulled underwater, Bethea told the Guardian.

But when she emerged from the water again, she saw Rhett in front of her in the water. "That's when I realized," she told the Guardian. The shark appeared "out of nowhere" at her side and bit her right calf. She screamed for her brother, "That was the only thing I could do." Just as he turned to look, the shark attacked again, this time to her right thigh, and pulled her underwater again.

Her brother later estimated the shark to be about three meters long, but they still don't know which genus it was. Bethea says in the report that she didn't feel any pain during the attack, but was just confused. The attack felt like it was in slow motion or like a dream. "When you try to scream and nothing comes out – that's how I felt. So I screamed as loud as I could so that someone would hear me and I wouldn't just die in the water."

The teen didn't just scream, though. From numerous documentaries, she recalled the advice to hit sharks on the nose in case of an attack.

When her brother reached her and tried to pull her towards her boat, Bethea slapped the shark on the nose, grabbed its gills and eyes. "The apple of his eye was the size of a baseball. Very big, very sticky – very disgusting," she told the Guardian. The shark let go again and again, but then attacked again.

She, too, has often heard before that sharks only accidentally bite people because they don't like the taste. "You hear that all your life – and then you're attacked by you."

Bethea's screams also made other people aware of the incident. Eventually, she was rescued onto a boat that came to the rescue. She was brought ashore, where a rescue attendant was already waiting to take her to a rescue helicopter. He flew her to the hospital.

There, the doctors were able to save enough of Bethea's leg so that she would not have to amputate immediately from the hip. In this case, she would probably have been confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, she says in the report. Instead, according to a few other options, her right leg was amputated above the knee.

The rehabilitation, which takes five months for comparable amputations, she completed in one and a half. In addition to her private environment, her faith in God also helped her. In the meantime, according to her own statements, she can do everything she did before. With the prosthesis, she quickly found her way around. Her life is now even better than before. She has learned to appreciate what she has. "When you've been through something like this, you don't take anything for granted," the Guardian quotes Bethea as saying.

She graduated from high school in May, and commented on Facebook with the words: "It only cost me one leg." She plans to enroll in an online college, perhaps to study physical therapy. "Since I've had to go through something like this, I feel like it would be good to help others."

Bethea was snorkeling again, at the scene of the attack. Swimming, shell-hunting and surfing are simply too big a part of her life to simply give it up.

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