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The 47-year-old Brooklyn resident was swimming with friends on Long Island coast about 20 yards off Fire Island on Tuesday, July 4, when she felt something bite into her upper left thigh.
“I screamed to my friends, ‘something is biting me.’ I felt like I was in a trap, it was holding onto me,” Emag said at a press conference at South Shore University Hospital in Bay Shore on Thursday, July 20.
Fortunately, she managed to get her hands inside the shark’s mouth and pry its jaw off her leg. Her friends helped her get back to shore and lifeguards called 911.
“We got out of the water, and I saw the blood trickling down,” she said.
Emag didn’t get a good look at the shark, but her friends estimated the creature was 4 to 5 feet long.
She was taken to South Shore University Hospital, where she ended up being the second person treated for a shark bite that day after a 47-year-old man was bitten near the Village of Quogue.
Doctors later removed the shark’s tooth from his hand.
For Emag, doctors flushed her wound with water and used an X-ray to make sure there weren’t any foreign objects in it before sending her home with antibiotics. The wound did not require stitches.
“It was multiple wounds, so a lot of abrasions and lacerations,” Nadia Baranchuk, an emergency room doctor at South Shore University Hospital, told reporters.
“The wounds were extensive, because of the size of the shark’s jaw. When we got to see her, she was not bleeding anymore, and she did not lose a lot of blood.”
Baranchuk said Emag didn’t even ask for pain medication, which surprised her given the circumstances.
“I think her adrenaline was still probably pretty high,” she said.
The incidents marked the first time the hospital had treated shark bites in five years, according to doctors.
“So this is a fairly uncommon occurrence,” said Dr. Sanjey Gupta. “For those of us that work at coastal hospitals now, shark bites are something that are always on our minds.”
So far this year, there have been 25 cases of sharks attacking people in the United States, according to the website TrackingSharks.com. Five of those were on Long Island.
Emag has not gone back into the ocean since her injury. Asked whether she ever will again once her wounds fully heal, she said, "probably."
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