It was from a hospital bed, in a daze from painkillers, overwhelming media attention and a lingering frisson from her brush with death, that Anika Craney saw the Facebook message:
“Welcome to Bite Club.”
Days earlier, she had been free-diving in the Great Barrier Reef when she saw a shark barreling toward her. She flipped around to put her fins between herself and the predator, but the murky water around her quickly turned crimson.
Blood coursing out of her left foot, she struggled to get to the beach, trying to stem the arterial bleeding and screaming for help. An off-duty medic fashioned a tourniquet out of a belt, saving her life and her limb.
Even in those early moments, Ms. Craney, then 29, was determined not to let the experience affect her lifelong bond with the ocean. From a gurney, as she was taken from the rescue helicopter into the hospital, she cried out to a swarm of news cameras: “I still love sharks!”
What she didn’t know was that the bite was the beginning of a long journey.
Yet to come were searing nerve pain, nightmares, sleepless nights, hallucinations and the loneliness of suffering from physical and psychological wounds that few can relate to. Still ahead were the offers of quick money for an interview or a documentary, which would only renew her trauma and underscore that the world’s interest was in the gruesome details of her encounter, not the grueling recovery that would never truly be over.
But Dave Pearson knew — because he had been through it a decade earlier, after a shark shredded his left forearm down to the bone, profoundly altering his life and his mind.
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The post Bite Club: The Fraternity That Awaits You After a Shark Attack appeared first on New York Times.
