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| A Colorado man was bitten by a shark and a bear within nine months of each other and survived. In this photo, a man takes a photograph as a gigantic 7.4 meter Great White Shark replica "floats" into Sydney Harbor on Nov. 26, 2013. Photo: Getty Images / Greg Wood |
By Riddhima Kanetkar, International Business Times - Business
A teenager from Colorado had a fortunate escape, yet again, after he survived a shark bite, just nine months after he was attacked by a bear.
20-year-old Dylan McWilliams, who is from Grand Junction, a city in Colorado's Western Slope region, spoke about the recent incident on Sunday and said he thought of himself as being fortunate in unfortunate situations.
According to a report in 9News.com, McWilliams is currently in Hawaii for a two-week long vacation and the incident occurred on Thursday. He said that he paddled out into the waters off the south shore of Kauai when something hit his leg.
“I was looking around and saw a lot of blood and I saw a shark underneath me. I started kicking at it… and swam as fast as I can to shore,” he said.
He added that when the shark attacked him he was several dozen yards from the beach and the scariest part for him was to swim back while the other surfers were some distance away.
McWilliams said that after he was bit, he did try to find the shark which he thinks was 6 or 7 feet long but was nervous that it could be somewhere nearby.
“There’s blood behind me and I didn’t really... know where [the shark] was,” he said.
Reports state that as soon as McWilliams reached the beach, he was assisted by a woman, who helped him contact emergency officials for medical help.
McWilliams reportedly ended up with seven stitches to close the shark bite.
In his first encounter with dangerous Nature in July 2017, McWilliams was working as an instructor, teaching survival skills at a camp in Boulder County, Colorado, when a bear showed up and attacked him in his sleep.
“I just woke up to a loud crunching sound. I remember a lot of pain and just being dragged across the ground by my head by a bear. I kind of thought it was a dream for a second. I didn’t know what was going on. When it pulled, it tore the skin and scraped along my skull which was like the cracking noise that I heard,” he said.
McWilliams said people have a hard time believing that all this could happen to a single person. “A lot of people don’t believe it, they’re like — that’s crazy. How does that happen to one person? Like, that rarely, rarely happens to anyone and — the same person twice,” he added.
However, even after suffering the injuries, McWilliams said he is not afraid of wildlife and considers the late Steve Irwin as one of his idols.
“Ever since I can remember, that’s all I wanted to be. I’m out with the animals all the time. To me, it’s like, I was in the wrong spot at the wrong time,” he said, referring to Irwin's work with animals.
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