A 13-year-old girl was attacked by a barracuda while on a birthday trip to Turks and Caicos. Claire Macdonel from Sugar Land, Texas, was swimming off the Caribbean islands on the first day of the trip when she “felt a lot of pressure,” KHOU 11 reports. “It was running through my whole arm, and it was just like a horror movie,” she told the outlet Tuesday. She had been wearing a shiny bracelet when she did a handstand in water around four to five feet deep. Speaking to Fox 26, she said it felt like “if your hand got stuck inside something’s mouth. I just felt a big bite, and then when I moved my hand, it just went away. I looked behind me and saw a big silver tail.” “I was very scared,” she added. “I was just anxious, like I was crying the whole time.” Her mom, Jen, told KHOU that a nearby nurse made a tourniquet, telling Fox: “I’ve never seen that much blood and I couldn’t get it to stop even with the tourniquet when we were in the ambulance. It was still just bleeding and then, of course, my second thought was she was going to lose her hand.” Macdonel, who wants to be a marine biologist when she grows up, will undergo surgery back in Texas this week.
Read it at People
