WASHINGTON (5 Sep 2001) -- A woman attacked by a shark off North Carolina's Outer Banks and whose boyfriend was mauled to death is recovering and talking to visitors, a surgeon said on Thursday. Natalia Slobonskaya, 23, was breathing without the help of a ventilator tube and her wounds could be surgically closed soon, said Dr. Jeffrey Riblet of Sentara General Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia. "Her wounds are healing well and I'm hopeful that we can get those closed as soon as possible," Riblet said on CBS program The Early Show. "She has done incredibly well and I'm very impressed by her courage and bravery." Doctors were waiting for the risk of infection to pass before sewing the wounds shut, Riblet said earlier. The attacks late on Monday on Slobonskaya and her companion Sergi Zaloukaev, both Russian nationals who lived outside Washington, D.C., were the latest in a series of well-publicized shark maulings on the U.S. East Coast this summer. Zaloukaev, 28, died of massive blood loss on the beach near Avon, North Carolina, in a remote area near Cape Hatteras, where he and Slobonskaya had come to spend the long Labor Day weekend with friends at a rented house. Slobonskaya lost a foot to the shark and suffered severe wounds to her left buttock and hip and cuts on her left hand. She will probably require plastic surgery, hospital officials said. | | The two were attacked while standing on a sandbar in waist-deep water. Two days earlier, a 10-year-old boy was mauled to death by a shark on Sandbridge Beach, Virginia, about 100 miles north of where the couple was attacked. The boy, Michael Peltier, of Richmond, Virginia, was due to be buried on Thursday. Eight-year-old Jessie Arbogast survived after a shark tore off his arm as he swam off Pensacola, Florida, in July. His severed limb was reattached by surgeons and he remains in guarded condition. Wall Street investor Krishna Thompson was bitten a few weeks later while on vacation in the Bahamas. Surgeons had to amputate his badly mauled leg. SOURCE - Reuters |
