Shark Bite Turns Swimmer Into Survivor

A 36-year-old man visiting the Bahamas was attacked by a shark over the weekend and forced to swim to shore with a shredded left leg that doctors later amputated.

Krishna Thompson, a Wall Street banker from Central Islip, N.Y., was in critical but stable condition Monday after surgeons removed his leg just above the knee, said Nicholas Namias, a trauma surgeon at Jackson Memorial Hospital.

“He’s awake, his breathing tube is out and his vital signs are stable,” Namias said. “It’s amazing what this guy did. He’s a real survivor.”

There have been at least two other high-profile shark attacks this summer, including one on July 6 on an 8-year-old boy whose arm was bitten off, and later reattached by doctors. He remains hospitalized in Pensacola, Fla.

Thompson and his wife arrived Friday in Freeport, Grand Bahamas, for their 10th wedding anniversary. He was attacked when he went for a swim the next morning.

“He apparently was fighting this thing off with his bare hands,” Namias said. “He’s got cuts on his hand to prove it.”

Thompson managed to swim to shore holding his mangled leg. A doctor who was jogging on the beach saw him, took a belt from a bystander and used it to make a tourniquet, Namias said.

Before passing out, Thompson wrote his wife’s room number in the sand.

“He knew that was the only way they were going to find me in time,” his wife, Ave Maria, told the Miami Herald. “He is so brave. To fight off a shark and then think to do that.”

George Burgess of the International Shark Attack File in Gainesville, Fla., said a swimmer’s chance of being attacked is no greater than it has been in recent years. There have been 31 attacks worldwide this year, including one fatality. Of those, 21 were in U.S. waters, including 16 off Florida.

The total number of shark attacks worldwide has increased in the last decade, but so has the number of swimmers in shark-infested waters.