Vance Flozenier knows how to keep a cool head in a crisis. When his eight-year-old nephew Jessie Arbogast was attacked by a bull shark in less than two feet of water, the quick-thinking man, along with a fellow beachgoer, grabbed the creature and flung it to the shore where it was shot 4 times by Ranger Jared Klein.
Unfortunately, his actions weren’t enough to stop the shark from biting off the boy’s right arm. Luckily, volunteer firefighter Tony Thomas pulled the arm from the shark’s gullet with a clamp, and the child and his arm were airlifted to Baptist Hospital some 30 minutes after the incident which occurred as the sun set at Gulf Islands National Seashore in northwest Florida.
Jessie’s arm was re-attached by medics at the hospital, but this was just the start of the little boy’s battle. Having lost huge amounts of blood, he arrived at the hospital with no pulse and no blood pressure, raising concerns that he may suffer brain damage even if the damage to his arm is repaired. According to Dr Rex Northup, Jessie suffered injury to “literally his entire body.” He continued, “Because of the shark injuries and loss of blood associated with that, his brain did go through a period of time with a very low amount of blood flow. If we can get another several days behind us where things don’t deteriorate, we’ll be happy with that.”
12 years on from the 2001 attack, Jessie Arbogast still bears the physical and mental scars of his ordeal. The twenty-year-old has been wheelchair bound since the encounter with the shark and has never regained the ability to speak, though occasional exclamations have been voiced. He suffers from brain damage caused by the almost complete lack of blood pressure in his body following the mauling and spent three years being fed by a tube. Yet the young man uses his eyes to communicate with his family, managing to joke with and tease his brother just like any siblings, and is an active, if mostly silent, participant in the life of his family. His devoted parents insisted on caring for him at home once the doctors had patched up his battered body as best they could, and they strive to be as independent and upbeat as possible. Even Jessie himself, says his mother, rarely wakes without a smile on his face. With such a dedicated family and having come so close to losing his life, perhaps his positive attitude is not as unbelievable as it may seem.
