Teen victim breaks silence on shark attack
Hunter Treschl on his outlook on life after losing an arm
The 16-year-old boy who lost his left arm Sunday in a shark attack at a North Carolina beach said he felt the big fish before he saw it in a videotaped interview released from his hospital bed.
Hunter Treschl said he was wading in waist-deep water with his cousin when he felt the shark bump his left leg.
"We were just playing around in the waves, and I felt a hit on my left calf," Treschl said. "I thought it felt like a big fish, and I started moving away. And then the shark bit my arm -- off.
"That was the first time I saw it, when it was biting up my left arm," he continued in the videotape, released Tuesday night by the New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Treschl said his cousin helped him back onto the beach while one bystander used his belt as a makeshift tourniquet to help stop the bleeding. The teen added that other bystanders "were all helping me kind of stay calm until the ambulance got there."
The native of Colorado Springs, Colo. said he is going to try to live a normal life despite the loss of his dominant hand.
"I have two options: I can try to live my life the way I was and make an effort to do that even though I don't have an arm, or I can just let this be completely debilitating and bring my life down and ruin it," Treschl said.
"Out of those two, there's really only one that I would actually choose and that's to try to fight and live a normal life with the cards I've been dealt."
A little more than an hour before the shark attacked Treschl and about 2 miles away Sunday, a 12-year-old Asheboro, N.C. girl, Kiersten Yow, lost her left arm below the elbow and suffered a leg injury when a shark bit her.
Earlier Tuesday, Charlotte paramedic Marie Hildreth told FoxNews.com of how she used part of a beach tent to wrap tourniquets around Yow's leg and arm and distracted the girl by asking her questions.
"I asked just simple things to keep her talking," she said of Yow, from Archdale, N.C. "She never cried, never complained. She answered all my questions."
Yow was in stable condition Tuesday at N.C. Children's Hospital at the University of North Carolina, according to a statement from her parents, Brian and Laurie Yow.
"She has a long road to recovery that will include surgeries and rehabilitation, but her doctors at UNC expect she will keep her leg, and for that we are grateful," they said, appealing for time to deal with the trauma privately.
FoxNews.com's Cristina Corbin and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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