Neither of them knew about the fatal shark attack at Virginia Beach just 48 hours earlier. So on Labor Day evening, 22-year-old Natalia Slobodskaya and her fiance, 28-year-old Sergei Zaloukaev, plunged into the ocean off Avon, N.C., carefree. They made their way beyond the breakers and swam parallel to shore, about 30 feet out, in 6-foot-deep water. The evening was lovely, and they seemed to have the ocean to themselves. Without warning, Slobodskaya felt something big and rough as sandpaper scrape her back. She was still trying to figure out what it had been when something began tugging her from below and behind. Her first thought was that a friend had swum up on her underwater, trying to scare her. But then Zaloukaev screamed, "It's a shark! Swim!" By the time they reached shore two or three minutes later, he had been mortally wounded and she was maimed for life. The attacker apparently was a bull shark, the same species blamed for the killing of 10-year-old David Peltier in Virginia Beach. Yesterday, Slobodskaya met with reporters at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where she has been since the attack, to recount the horror of that evening and her ongoing struggle to recover physically and emotionally. She is 5 feet tall, with long brown hair, thick glasses and, as a result of the attack, a prosthetic foot. A native of Moscow who immigrated to the United States with her family six years ago, she spoke with a slight accent but a clear memory of what happened. Her account: Natalia and Sergei, who lived in Oakton in Fairfax County, had rented a beach house at Avon, a village on Hatteras Island, for the fourth vacation in as many summers. They had heard about several shark attacks in Florida earlier in the year but not about the one two days earlier in Virginia Beach, 135 miles north of Avon. They entered the ocean just before 6 p.m. with three friends, but the friends got out and walked a short distance down the beach. There were no other swimmers in sight when the shark struck. Natalia and Sergei swam frantically for shore. Both were strong swimmers, but the going seemed impossibly slow, and the shark seemed determined not to let them escape. It came at them again and again from different directions, first from behind Natalia, then from below her, then at Sergei, as she could tell from his screams. "We never knew from which way she was coming," Natalia said of the shark. She always referred to the shark as "she" or "her" because in the Russian language, the noun "shark" is in the feminine gender. She never actually saw the shark, partly because it stayed beneath the water and partly because she was not wearing her glasses. But she could always sense when it was about to strike her. A strong rush of water against her legs would tell her. And she could feel the shark's hide - "rough and disgusting like the skin of a beast," she said. "I still wake up at night feeling it. It is the feeling of her skin that I have nightmares about." The shark struck Natalia repeatedly. She lost count of the bites. They were not sharply painful at the time, but even in her fright she realized they were doing grave injury to her. After one bite, she recalled, "I knew I probably didn't have a leg anymore." More than once she shoved the shark away with her hands. Its teeth gashed open her wrist and tore off the tip of one finger. "It was like a struggle," she said, "but it's hard to struggle when you don't see your enemy." The shark seemed to be going back and forth between her and Sergei. They exchanged no words after his original shark warning, only screams. Amid her fear, she felt "a feeling of disbelief, that this was just some sort of a strange dream I should wake up from as soon as possible." | | Natalia Slobodskaya She felt certain that if they could only reach shore they would survive. But when they finally struggled into the breaking surf, where the water apparently was too shallow for the shark, they saw that their friends were too far away to hear their cries. Those moments were perhaps the most frightening of all, she said. She looked into the water and saw that it was discolored with their blood. Her energy was ebbing fast, and Sergei, despite his own injuries, helped her toward shore. She believes "he spent some of the energy he didn't have saving me." The couple's friends soon recognized their distress and rushed to them. They separated them on the beach, perhaps, Natalia said, to spare her the knowledge of how gravely Sergei was hurt. "I remember lying on my back [on the beach] with my eyes on the sky," she said. "My main thinking was about whether Sergei was all right." The pain was starting to build. She used yoga breathing techniques to try to stay calm and conscious. She stayed conscious throughout the emergency helicopter flight to Sentara Norfolk General and even gave the doctors there permission to anesthetize her. After that, she knew nothing for four days. Sergei was in full cardiac arrest by the time the ambulance crew reached him on the beach. He was taken to a small medical center in Avon, where he was pronounced dead. A medical examiner later listed the cause of death as "loss of blood due to multiple shark bites." Members of Natalia's family broke that news to her when they felt she could bear it. Natalia had lost her left foot at the ankle and most of her right buttock. The shark had taken a chunk of it 15 inches in diameter and deep to the bone. Since Labor Day she has endured four operations and still awaits plastic surgery. She walks on her prosthetic foot with the aid of crutches. She said the skin from the large bite has grown back amazingly well, although she has needed a skin graft. She said she hopes to be released from the hospital within a week. Getting over Sergei's death will take much longer. "I loved him more than my life," she said. "I could never have imagined they would have been able to save me and not Sergei." She said she spent the first week in denial, unwilling to believe the attack had happened. Then came hysteria. But finally, she said, she has decided, "You can't hide from what happened." She has remained enrolled at George Washington University in Washington, where she has been working on a doctorate in human studies. She has been catching up on some of her studies in her hospital room. On Saturday, her friends and family helped her celebrate her 23rd birthday with a party in her hospital room. The menu included champagne and sushi. |
