In August 2011, Lydia Strunk was on holiday on the Caribbean island Vieques, east of Puerto Rico. At night, she was on aguided tour with 16 US-American tourists kayaking to a bioluminescent bay. She entered the water with four others to see the unique glow of microorganisms when the shark attacked.

A nearly two meter long tiger shark bit into her leg, severing nerves and tendons and causing massive blood loss. Lydia remembered: "I felt a strong impact against my right leg and it pulled me into the water a bit. Then I felt the shark swim across my left leg and swim away." She said, it did not feel like a bite in that moment, but then: "I instinctively lifted my right leg up and saw that it was shredded." The law student from San Diego managed to scramble back into the kayak. "I was in a state of frightened disbelief, I couldn’t believe it was happening."

Once in the kayak, the tour guides put a tourniquet around her leg and paddled as fast as they could back to shore, where they put her in the company van and sped off to the local hospital of Vieques. "We embarked on a 10 to 15 minute bumpy ride on these dark island roads and then we reached the emergency room,“ she remembered. "Once people started to act, I was a little bit more calm.” There the 30 centimetres long wound on her lower leg was treated and the bleeding stopped.

Later that night, she was airlifted from the local hospital of Vieques to the capital on the mainland. In San Juan at the airport she had to wait 30 minutes for an ambulance which drove her to Rio Piedras Medical Center. During an hours-long surgery on the following day, four tendons and a nerve were reattached. The 27-year-old woman had to stay for a week in the hospital. She is expected to have a good recovery but will likely have some nerve damage and limited movement in her right foot.

The student spends six weeks in a cast. A friend wrote on it: "You are truly one-in-a-million". She corrects: "Actually the probability is one to 11 millions to be attacked by a shark." Especially in Puerto Rico, only seven attacks have ever been reported, two of them fatal.