Diver Gets Rescued from a Shark Attack by a Boatload of Nurses

Source – A spearfisherman who was attacked by a shark over the weekend in Florida was saved by a group of medical professionals who just happened to be in a boat nearby.

The 40-year-old diver was bitten by a shark while diving near Key Biscayne on Saturday morning, and his companions flagged down a passing charter fishing boat to help him. Kayle Evans, an employee for Hot Shot Charters, told ABC Miami affiliate WPLG.

Little did the injured man know that the boat he was climbing into was full of nurses ready to assist him during his emergency, including Christine Haines and Glaiza Martin, a pediatric nurse and an operating nurse respectively at San Antonio’s Stone Oak Methodist Hospital. …

The bite was so severe that the man’s arm was “mangled” and he was “just blood from arm to foot,” Evans said.

The nurses immediately applied a tourniquet to the man’s arm while Evans rinsed him off with a hose, he said.

“He was wearing a wet suit, but he had bite marks in about three different places,” Haines, who was on vacation with Martin in Miami, told ABC News. “He had muscle and skin hanging off. The teeth marks were in his hand and skin was hanging off. There was quite a lot of blood.”

For the purposes of our discussion here I’m going to put aside the fact that a disproportionate percentage of my fantasies over the years have involved me be rescued at sea by a literal boatload of nurses. I’m not sure exactly where that one came from but it’s probably a mashup of a lot of “Love Boats” at an early age, Mary Ann from “Gilligans Island,” Janine Lindemulder on that Blink 182 cover, and Steve Trevor washing up on Wonder Woman’s island with all the Amazonians running around and having Diane nurse him back to health. Or it’s just a variation on the Bikini Bus scene from “Dumb & Dumber”:

Regardless, I’m already off topic. The real issue here – the great philosophical question I want to pose – is, when you’re attacked by a shark and then immediately rescued by trained medical professionals is: Are you lucky or unlucky? I mean, sure, you’ve gone in an instant from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs so fast you’re lucky if you don’t die from the psychological bends. Try and imagine a worse way to face your own doom than bleeding out in the middle of the ocean with a blood-crazed apex predator swimming circles around you. But then to be fished out, not by just a bunch of drunk tourist casting for tuna but by the very people you need to save your life has got to be a billion to one shot.

But the question remains: Is this guy lucky? Because the odds of getting eaten by a shark are pretty infinitesimal too. Unless “Shark Week” has been lying to us all these years when they say these majestic creatures of the deep are no threat to us.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of it when, say, you get into a car accident and someone asks if you got hurt and you say, “No” and they immediately go, “Well then you were lucky.” Not really. “Luck” wouldn’t been NOT getting T-boned at an intersection or losing control on black ice and skidding into a tree. I’m a believer that coming away uninjured but with your car totaled isn’t something I want to chalk up as a win.

And in the case of this guy, OK, he’s alive. And that’s a big plus. But when you lose on a billion to one shot of getting attacked by a shark and then hit on a billion to one shot of getting rescued by a boatload of nurses, simple math tells me you broke even. And based on the description of those injuries, the vig on those wagers is pretty substantial. I’m calling him unlucky. So congratulations on what is basically a wash, I guess?