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Shark attack survivor Leah Stewart has told of her terrifying battle with a great white shark at a Sydney beach, and how thoughts of her daughter growing up without her spurred her on as she “fought like hell” to stay alive.
A little over two months after losing part of her left arm and a “catastrophic” amount of blood, Stewart told Nine’s 60 Minutes program on Sunday she could feel her life slipping away as she lay on the sand of Coogee Beach on a weekend morning in June.
“It just felt like everything was leaving my body and I was going somewhere,” Stewart said.
But then she thought of her baby daughter, August, growing up without her mum.
“I just knew I couldn’t leave her … I know it sounds strange but I sort of willed myself back,” Stewart told the Nine program.
It was the middle of a winter’s day and Stewart had been swimming between the flags in clear waters under blue skies at a beach that had not reported a shark attack in more than a hundred years.
She was just about to head in to shore to play with August on the beach.
“I heard a girl behind me … a shrill shriek. I turned and there was a huge, huge fin behind her. It was massive,” she said.
“I looked at the size of it and I realised that’s not a dolphin.”
She began to swim to shore but felt movement in the water nearby.
“I turned around, and it was right there … and it just was getting closer and closer and closer.”
Stewart said she thought briefly about which limb she was willing to lose as she looked into the looming shark’s beady black eyes.
“I’m right-handed, so I thought ‘let’s do a left hook’,” she said.
“I just kind of throw my left arm and it just grabs onto my forearm and rips, rips away my skin, my muscle, everything … there’s a big gap between my forearm and the hand.”
But the shark wasn’t done.
Stewart took a deep breath as the four-metre great white grabbed onto her leg and pulled her under the water. She thought this was how she would die. But then she thought of daughter, August.
“In my head, I was like, ‘You ugly f—er. You are not taking me away from my daughter’, and I twisted myself around and I just started punching it over and over and over again.
“It was like fighting a dinosaur. It was so big. It was like punching a brick wall.
“I must have got a really good one in and so it let me go.”
“It was the hardest thing in the world, but I fought my way out of there.”
She had beaten back the shark, but Stewart’s fight was not over. A crew of rescuers, including champion paddleboarder Charlie Verco and off-duty lifeguard Ben Heenan got Stewart to shore before a team of clinicians at St Vincent’s Hospital worked to miraculously save a patient who was barely conscious, hardly breathing and with an undetectable pulse.
It’s a condition medical professionals artfully describe as “not compatible with life”.
Incompatibility aside, Stewart is alive, to be with her daughter and to give her gratitude to the people who saved her.
Stewart’s first thoughts were again for her daughter more than a week after the attack when she emerged from an induced coma, her brother Joshua previously revealed.
Her incredible tale of survival is one she plans to tell August some day.
“Not anytime soon … she’ll understand the full story a bit when she’s much older,” Stewart said.
“I thought maybe I’ll just write her a little children’s book, and I’ll work very carefully on the wording and how it goes.
“Along the lines of: ‘Mummy loved you so much that, even when the scariest, scariest thing could happen … she loved you so much that she was able to conquer that’.”
It’s a story she can tell with props. A broken-off piece of the shark’s tooth.
“It’s a symbol of what I survived,” Stewart said.
“I took home something from him. He took a lot away from me, but I got a tooth,” Stewart said.
Jack Gramenz is a breaking news reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.From our partners
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