Australian shark attack survivor Leah Stewart has shared a heartbreaking update on her recovery, three and a half months after the life-threatening incident.
The mother of one lost an arm while swimming near the shore, between the flags, at the popular beach on June 13. She has now revealed that her latest skin graft has failed.
In an Instagram post shared on Tuesday morning, Stewart said doctors had examined the graft and delivered “not the update I was hoping for.”
“Unfortunately this is not the post I was wanting to do but I had my graft checked yesterday and it was confirmed that it failed,” Stewart said.
“So, I am feeling pretty devastated, had quite a few tears and now we’re not really sure where to go from here.”
Stewart said her leg remained “still open” after three and a half months of treatment.
“I guess the only good thing is we’re trying something different, so I’m having a little break from the vac machine, which means I can move a little bit more freely.”
The device, known as Vacuum-Assisted Closure, or VAC, is designed to keep a new skin graft securely in place while supporting the healing process.
It uses suction to draw the wound together and remove excess fluid.
During the video, Stewart showed her leg to viewers for the first time since the shark attack.
“I guess a lot of you wouldn’t know what a skin graft looks like, so I’ll actually show you,” she said, stepping back from the camera.
“I haven’t shown my legs yet, so I’m a little nervous about this.
“Here is where they took the skin from my right leg,” she said, pointing to the top of her thigh.
“It’s still pretty raw but thankfully it’s healing. And they put it on my left leg, but unfortunately it didn’t work.
“Anyway, we keep moving forward.”
The failed procedure was Stewart’s second attempt at a skin graft.
Earlier this month, the 34-year-old Sydney mother revisited her harrowing survival story on Australia’s version of 60 Minutes. She described the moment she came face-to-face with a shark shortly before it severed her arm and left her fighting for her life at Coogee Beach in June.
“In my head, I was like, ‘You ugly f–ker, you are not taking me away from my daughter,’” Stewart told the current affairs program.
“I twisted myself around and I just started punching it over and over and over again … I think I must have got a really good one in. And so it let me go.”
After the interview aired, Stewart faced criticism from some viewers who accused her of fabricating parts of the attack, claiming she could not have remembered them. Former AFL player and current radio host Brendan Fevola was among those who questioned her account.
Fevola implied Stewart was playing up her account of being attacked by the shark and repeatedly punching it away.
“She’s missing a limb, like her forearm is gone … if a shark was attacking you, you wouldn’t have much time to think I wouldn’t have thought,” Fevola said on radio.
“I was on the couch with my wife Alex and my kids going, ‘She’s lying. Too much time to think. You’re not thinking all that, are you?’
“We don’t know but,” he went on to say. “This tough girl punched the shark.”
Shark expert Joel Nancarrow, also known as Hunter Shark Jaw Restoration by his social media followers, issued a blunt message to Stewart’s online trolls, slamming them as “the problem.”
“The amount of judging and accusations of exaggerating while she was literally being eaten alive is beyond comprehension,” he wrote in a lengthy statement on September 5.
“She’s being abused for calling the shark a monster while she was in its mouth. She’s quite entitled to call it whatever she wants in this situation, the fact that people even bring that up is the reason we (put) warning labels on batteries telling us not to eat them.”
Nancarrow said he observed the baseless comment “it’s their home” more than he could count, questioning how it would make the situation “any more less scary.”
“Just because people are living life and not hiding behind their screens scared of everything in the big wide (world) doesn’t mean this stuff doesn’t suck, people die in car accidents all the time, cars are on the road, it’s still tragic,” he said.
“If a shark attack where a woman almost lost her life and a child her mother, makes you deep think into how you can belittle her in an online comment section as your first thought, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.”
A host of people on the beach contributed to saving Stewart’s life, including a world champion paddleboarder who brought her to shore, a trauma-specialist doctor who was having a coffee nearby, and Life Savers and uniformed police on patrol.
In the hospital, Stewart’s left arm was amputated below the elbow; she was in an induced coma for 10 days and underwent multiple surgeries.
