Emma Guinness
Shark attacks are extremely rare, but when they take place, they can be devastating.
Paige Winter, 20, discovered this first-hand in the summer of 2019 while ‘playing mermaids’ with her dad's girlfriend's seven-year-old at Fort Macon beach in North Carolina.
She opened up about her experience to LADbible, telling them that it happened on ‘just another beach day’ when everyone was ‘having a really good time’.
Winter said of the sudden attack: “I leaned backwards to kind of flop backwards onto my back, and then swim backwards and come back up like a mermaid, but once I had gone backwards, I had stepped on something and then the chaos began.”
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At first, she thought her dad was playing a joke on her – it was only when she felt a pain that she realised she was under attack.
Winter said: "I felt a sharp pain on my ankle, and then nothing else. It felt like forever.
"I felt like I was under there for 20 minutes but it was more like 20 seconds. It wasn’t long at all."
Her dad stepped in to save her life by punching the shark, which had attacked in shallow water, five times in the nose.
But while her dad was able to save her, it didn’t stop the shark from inflicting devastating injuries.
Winter’s dad recalled seeing two fins as she was saved from its jaws, meaning that there were likely two sharks involved in the attack.
She added: "I still had the whole leg attached to me, it was really, really awful.
"You could see bone, you could see teeth marks in the bone."
Winter was understandably ‘distressed’ as she was rushed to hospital, but said that she couldn’t feel much pain.
She explained: “I was just kind of sitting there and I felt the way that TV static looks, when your foot falls asleep, that’s how I felt.”
It was at the hospital that she discovered she was going to lose her leg.
As well as this, she had two fingers amputated, which she told LADbible was the hardest change to adjust to.
She said that while it only took her a few days to adjust to her prosthetic leg, 'it took me a good year to figure out how to put my hair up again'.
But Winter surprisingly doesn't hold the attack against sharks and asserted that the shark was only following its natural instincts.
“They’re just creatures,” she said. “We’re all just creatures doing our best. They’re not evil to me.”
“They’re just animals doing animal stuff.
“My cat bites me all the time and I still love him.”