A shark at.tacked a 17-year-old girl on a Florida beach, but she survived because she kept fighting and her brother intervened immediately. A shark bit Addison Bethea as she was scalloping on Grassy Island, near Keaton Beach.

The water was around 5 feet deep. The next thing I know, something grips my leg, and I think, “That’s not right,” the adolescent says. “Then I look, and it’s a huge old shark.”

Addison had heard on Animal Planet that if a shark teases you, you should hit it in the nose, but the shark bit her so hard that she couldn’t reach its snout. Despite this, she battled it and attempted to rip it off with her own hands.

When Addison’s brother, Rhett, saw the fluid, he went into the water to help her.

“When she returned, I saw the liquid and all, and I saw the shark. He never stopped coming. So I grabbed her, swam backwards, kicked him, and called for assistance. ”

Rhett, a 22-year-old Taylor County EMT and fireman, fought and kicked the shark relentlessly to save his sister. When she was free, he grabbed her and placed her in his boat.

When a neighboring boater saw that they were in difficulty, he volunteered to assist, and Rhett loaded Addison into his boat. He then made a 4-foot tourniquet out of a boat rope and tied it around her right upper thigh to halt the bleeding.

Rhett requested an ambulance before returning to shore via boat.

Addison was seriously injured and had to be airlifted nearly 80 miles to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, where she was first classified in serious condition. “The shark bit her right leg, and the front quad muscle was damaged,” Addison’s father, Shane, said.

It was a nasty wound, a really severe wound. The vascular surgeon converted a vein from the left leg into an artery for the right leg.

Doctors do not want to amputate her leg at the hip. Surgeons will also attempt to salvage enough tissue from her lower leg so that a prosthesis may be connected to it. “What matters most is that she is still alive!” Shane said.

Despite having recently been through something terrifying, Addison remains positive.

The girl is already set to have a second surgery to figure out how bad her injury is and what can be done to save her limb.

The shark that injured Addison was around 9 feet long, but the sheriff’s office has no idea what kind of shark it was. They also sent out safety cautions to everyone who swims or seeks scallops in the region.