Dragged underwater by a great white shark at a Sydney beach, Leah Stewart thought she was going to die. Later, the heroes who brought her to shore and the ones who operated on her, thought so too.
“I’m here. I’m alive,” Stewart told Nine’s 60 Minutes program on Sunday night.
“It was the hardest thing in the world, but I fought my way out of there.”
Stewart was swimming at Coogee Beach on a Saturday morning in June, about to head back to shore to play with her baby daughter August, when she came face to face with a four-metre great white shark.
About 100 metres away, world champion paddleboarder Charlie Verco was training for an upcoming race.
Normally, coming into Coogee was a relief. Close to the shore, and with people around.
“That day, it was so nice that there were swimmers all around me,” Verco told the Nine program. Nine is also the publisher of this masthead.
Then Verco saw a big shadow in the water, and he realised there was a big shark accompanying it.
The water clouded with blood as Stewart fought off the shark, which had ripped away her arm and dragged her underwater.
“There was a lot of thrashing and that was around the time where I actually saw the shark come out of the water,” Verco said, as he recalled being shocked by “the volume of it”.
“I kind of realised this thing’s actually just not going to be scared of me,” he said.
He signalled lifeguards to sound the alarm and started paddling.
“There was so much blood in the water that I couldn’t see into it any more,” Verco said.
Stewart managed to swim towards Verco as he tried to pull her on to his board. Her fight with the shark had shredded her hands and she struggled to hold on as Verco desperately paddled, backwards, towards the beach.
“Thank goodness, I got the world record holder for paddling,” Stewart said.
Surf lifesaver Ben Heenan was coming out to meet them. He and Verco carried Stewart onto the sand as Heenan’s partner, doctor Kassandra McGregor phoned triple zero.
Police patrols had been stepped up in Sydney’s east after the Bondi Beach terror attack in September and officers joined with doctors on the scene, making desperate efforts to stem Stewart’s bleeding.
“It was just luck that it was the riot squad … and they have a tourniquet on their uniform,” Heenan said.
Trauma specialist Ian Ferguson was on hand to help, but he didn’t hold much hope.
“Having seen the amount of blood that was in the water and seeing the extent of her wounds … she was pretty close to [bleeding to death],” Ferguson said.
McGregor had applied the tourniquets, but Stewart’s veins were “completely flat” so Ferguson drilled into the bone marrow of Stewart’s shoulders to deliver fluids and blood, before she was rushed to hospital.
Emergency specialist Nikki Woods was leading the emergency department at St Vincent’s Hospital when Stewart arrived, barely conscious and incredibly pale.
“My priority was to stabilise her, but get her up to theatre as soon as possible,” Woods said.
Seventeen minutes later, Stewart was heading into surgery. Surgeon Kim Isaacs was doing the same.
“I did think that she was going to die,” Isaacs said.
“It doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.”
A soaking wet sheet that ended up in the operating theatre carried in “half the sand from Coogee Beach” as surgeons worked to control Stewart’s bleeding. Her left arm could not be saved and was amputated below the elbow. Stewart remained in an induced coma for another 10 days, undergoing multiple further surgeries.
Since regaining consciousness, Stewart has been learning to walk again and rehabilitating her severely injured right hand with therapist Meredith Rogers.
Rogers said Stewart, after fighting off a shark, spurred by the thought of her daughter growing up without her mum, had “constantly exceeded everyone’s expectations” on her recovery.
While there were many doubts she could survive, Woods said she had a feeling Stewart would pull through.
“There’s a power of being young and a mum, and you’re resilient, and you’ve got all that family support,” Woods said when she and Stewart met recently.
Woods is just one of the many people Stewart has since thanked for saving her life.
“They’ve all played such an important piece in getting me to here now, and I’m very, very grateful for everything they’ve done for me,” Stewart said.
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