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1 week ago
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A 10-year-old girl whose hand was reattached after it was severed in a shark attack has spoken of her remarkable recovery after a “miracle” six-hour operation that has allowed her to resume knitting outfits for her beloved Barbie dolls.
Leah Lendel’s right hand was left hanging by shreds of skin after the bite by a 9ft bull shark as she was snorkeling with her family at a beach in Boca Grande, Florida, in June.
Her mother, Nadia, frantically tried to get Leah and her younger sisters, aged one and three, out of the shallow water and on to land. Nearby construction workers raced to help, one of them placing a tourniquet on Leah’s arm and others wrapping the wound in a towel until first responders arrived.
Leah, who was nine when she was injured, and her mother spoke of their ordeal for the first time in an interview on CBS’s Inside Edition on Monday night, recalling the shark attack and praising the skill of surgeons at Tampa general hospital (TGH). Leah was able to move two fingers within 24 hours of the operation, and is now undergoing intensive physical therapy to regain as much movement as possible.
“They told me that they are going to put my hand back, but I didn’t really believe them. It’s impossible,” Leah said when asked what doctors told her ahead of the surgery.
The fourth-grader said she barely saw the shark that bit her, which swam away quickly, but realized what had happened.
“I think I saw like its tail, and then it just let go, and then I scream out, and I see my hand just bleeding, and I knew it was a shark,” she said.
“I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do now? Am I ever going to see my hand again?’”
Video taken by a sheriff’s deputy at the scene showed Nadia Lendel in a state of distress, telling responders what had happened. She told Inside Edition she was in the water three feet apart from her daughter when the shark swam in.
“It was just stump, and her wrist was just hanging off, and there was just blood squirting everywhere,” she said through tears.
“She was like right there. She was just quiet. She wasn’t screaming, she wasn’t making any kind of commotion. She was just standing there and I looked over to [her] and her hand, it was like held by a piece of skin, and it looked like it started to, like, go down to the ground.
“I just didn’t want her to bleed to death. That was my biggest worry.”
Leah was taken by helicopter to the hospital, where X-rays revealed significant tissue loss. But “no missing bones,” Leah said, adding: “I thought I was never going to have a hand again. But I still do.”
She was able to move two fingers the day after the reattachment, and had regained some feeling and movement in all of her fingers over the following two days.
“That’s a miracle … but they did have to take arteries from her leg to repair all of that. And then they were repairing pretty much the tendons,” Nadia Lendel said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for TGH said: “Thanks to the swift action of her family, first responders and the extraordinary care team, Leah’s story became one of survival and strength.”
It credited surgeons at the Florida Orthopaedic Institute and pediatric experts at the Muma children’s hospital at TGH for saving her hand.
Leah has worked extensively with an occupational therapist in the months since, and said she had knitted her doll a skirt and hat ahead of a trip to New York for the interview. A GoFundMe appeal to help with the family’s medical bills was approaching $60,000 on Tuesday after the interview aired.
Shark attacks on humans remain rare. In 2024, there were 47 unprovoked shark bites and 24 provoked bites worldwide, according to the International Shark Attack File, a a resource from the Florida Museum of Natural History. Of the 28 unprovoked attacks in the US, 14 were in Florida.
