North Carolina Shark Attack Victim Hunter Treschl 'Didn't Feel Anything'
— -- The 16-year-old Colorado boy who lost his arm to a shark off the coast of North Carolina says he felt no pain during the attack.
“I feel something against my leg…it all happened very, very quickly,” Hunter Treschl told ABC News in his first interview since being released from the hospital.
“I’m thinking, ‘There’s no way this just happened, because there’s no pain,’” he said. “I didn’t feel anything.”
Treschl, of Colorado Springs, was on vacation earlier this month near Oak Island, North Carolina, when the shark attack occurred. The high school junior says he was only in waist-high water for about one minute when the shark attacked.
“I saw the shark on my left arm,” he said. “It was half way up my bicep kind of. It just attached and then it wasn’t attached anymore.”
Treschl was dragged to the shore by his cousin and then saved by fellow beachgoers who used everything they could find on the beach to help stop the bleeding.
“[One] guy was using his belt as a tourniquet on my arm,” Treschl recalled. “I had a pretty interesting conversation with this guy.”
“I don’t remember most of it [but] he friended me on Facebook so it can’t have been that bad,” he said.
Treschl was eventually transported to a local hospital and had his left arm amputated below the shoulder.
The teen’s shark attack came just a little more than one hour after another swimmer, 12-year-old Kiersten Yow, was also attacked by a shark, just about 2 miles away from where Treschl was attacked.
Yow lost her left arm below the elbow and also had injuries to one leg.
“Just stay strong,” Treschl said of what he would tell Yow. “It’s not a life-changing thing to lose an arm.”
“As time goes on, prosthetics technology is going to be just unreal compared to what we imagine today and it’s always improving,” he continued. “So, who knows, 30 years, it might be like having a second arm.”
Treschl, who was born left-handed, says he is adjusting to a new way of life.
“I was a pretty avid gamer as well but I’ve got plans to get that back,” Treschl said. “I played on PC so there’s lots of stuff I can do to play with one arm. It’s not that difficult.”
Treschl, also a string bass violin player, is moving forward with the wisdom of someone well beyond his years.
“There’s nothing I can really do except focus on the future,” he said. “I have no power over a shark biting me but I do have power over, like, what I do about it."
