In Their Words: Ali Truwit — Shark Attack Survivor | 1

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0:19From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds.

0:28on this show we tell the true stories of people who sometimes out of nowhere are confronted with life or death situations people who in the face of incredible obstacles must find a way to dig deep to survive and sometimes we get to hear from these survivors themselves in their own words We've heard from people who've been bitten by rattlesnakes, fallen off cliffs, or been stranded in the desert. And in this episode, we'll hear from someone who found herself fighting for her life after being attacked by a shark. In May of 2023, 22-year-old Allie Truitt was riding the high of a competitive college swimming career.

1:12She'd just graduated from Yale, completed her first marathon, and had a job lined up in New York City for the fall. I just think back to that time, this time where I felt like I was on top of the world. But just a few days after graduation, Allie was snorkeling with a friend off Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean, when all that changed. We had been snorkeling for about three minutes when, seemingly out of nowhere, this shark appeared. Pretty quickly after that, it had my leg in its mouth. Today, Allie Truitt is here to share her story, her fight for survival, and how the journey to reclaim her love of the water pushed her further than she could have ever imagined.

1:53I would be in these massive bouts of pain, and I would just repeat, I can and I will, I can and I will. This is Allie Truitt, shark attack survivor.

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2:53The love of water runs deep in Allie Truitt's family. My earliest memories of swimming start when I was really, really young. I grew up on the water on the Long Island Sound, and I am one of four. I have three brothers. From a really early age, my mom stressed the importance of being water safe. So we were put in swim lessons. And when I think back to those days, I remember just immediately falling in love with the water. I loved baths and pools and oceans and showers, and I just never wanted to get out. The water just kind of felt like this place that I was always happy and I was joyful in. And I felt free and light and unburdened by anything else that I had going on or was worried about in my life.

3:38Pretty soon, Allie's love for swimming grew into a drive to compete. As the only girl with three brothers, it's kind of survival of the fittest. You have to be competitive to kind of get your word in there. And so I've always had that mindset of loving competing and wanting to win and push myself. I grew up playing a ton of sports. I tried everything, ballet, field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, basketball. And for me, swimming kind of remained as that true love. In high school, Allie dedicated herself to training 15 to 20 hours a week with the goal of getting into a Division I college swimming program.

4:13I loved the grind and the journey to my goals and the way that I had shown myself that I had way more in me than I thought. The hard work paid off. Allie got into Yale, where her mom had been captain of the women's varsity team. She quickly found her groove in the pool. I gravitated naturally towards distance swimming and clicking into a consistent pace and hitting it over and over and over again. I swam the mile, I swam the 1 ,000 freestyle, the 500 freestyle. It's like a joke because people say I'm super sweet on deck and then when I dive in, it's go time and I'm competing and I want to get my hand on the wall first.

4:48One of my least favorite things is finishing a race and thinking I had more to give. That's your time to throw everything you have at what you're competing at. You've trained for it, you've put in that work, you've woken up at 5 a.m., you've done lifts, you've gone to practice, you've sacrificed hanging out with friends and whatever it is. And so I just want to give everything I have, whatever race it is.

5:12But after two successful seasons with the team, Allie was diagnosed with Hashimoto's disease, an autoimmune condition that causes extreme fatigue and muscle weakness. It was a really, really hard time for me that took way more out of me than I ever expected mentally and physically. At the end of her junior year, Allie made the decision to retire from competitive swimming. That was an incredibly hard decision that took a lot of time and honestly led to a lot of tears. But I'm a big mantra person. And one of the quotes that I love is, you can't control the cards you're dealt. You can just control how you play them.

5:56So Allie focused on her health and cheered her teammates on from the sidelines. In her spare time, she started running. And I loved running. And so by the end of my senior year, I had actually set a goal with my mom to run a marathon. A week before her college graduation, Allie achieved that goal. My mom and I ran a marathon together on Mother's Day, which was so special. And so I just felt like I was on this high of just like the most fun wrap-up to an incredible college experience.

6:30On May 22nd, 2023, Allie graduated from Yale. The next day, Allie and her friend Sophie Pilkington boarded a plane to Turks and Caicos, a small island chain near the Bahamas. Sophie was actually the captain of the Yale swim team my freshman year, and we had become incredibly close friends. We were taking the celebratory trip for my graduation from Yale and her graduation from medical school. We had worked so hard that it was like this kind of break and release to just breathe and have fun and relax and tan in the sun. On the morning of May 24th, 2023, the two friends awoke in paradise. They worked out and then planned to go snorkeling in the afternoon.

7:13So the boat ride out there, I feel like both of us were in a state of just like pure joy. Like Sophie and I were so happy to be there and in the sunshine and staring at clear blue waters and enjoying each other and our friendship and cherishing that. We put on our snorkeling gear and jumped in the water. Allie and Sophie explored the water for about 30 minutes. They saw a few fish, but not much else. So they decided to head back to the boat. We were leisurely floating around as we were deciding to go back because both of us love the water and it's fun to float in saltwater and feel so light and free.

7:48And that is when, seemingly out of nowhere, this shark appeared. Sophie saw it first and she screamed my name and it took me a moment to realize what she was pointing at or screaming. You know, that's never where your mind goes immediately. So at first I thought she was like pointing out a cool fish. But then she quickly realized it was a shark. The next thing I knew, it was underneath us. It was bumping us. It was ramming us. And we were doing our best to like kick and shove back and fight. And you could feel its aggression, like it wanted to fight. And we were doing everything we could to survive.

8:22And in that moment, that was fighting back. Pretty quickly after that, it had my leg in its mouth. and then the next thing I knew my leg had been bitten off.

8:35One of the hardest images that stuck in my mind was that I paused because I realized I didn't have a foot. Like I was like am I crazy or do I not have a foot right now? And I turned around to check and I have this image of crystal clear blue water and then my leg with just flesh at the end and a cloud of red around it. Just such a harrowing image to think about a foot that you've seen for 22 years of your life and to see your leg with nothing there. We screamed for help, but no help came. So we made the split-second decision to swim for our lives back to the boat, which was roughly 75 yards away in the open ocean water.

9:18and I was bleeding profusely and footless and Sophie and I both knew that a shark was still circling us. Sophie is such an incredible and selfless friend that she's staying with me. And so if I don't get back to the boat, Sophie's not getting back either. We needed to save ourselves. We knew that I was at risk of bleeding out and dying. We knew that I was at risk of passing out in the water and we threw our snorkels and we sprinted towards the boat. All I repeated to myself over and over was just get to the boat, just get to the boat. While Ali and Sophie raced to get out of the water, the shark again swam toward them.

9:53Thankfully, this time, it didn't attack. When they finally pulled themselves aboard, Sophie's medical school training kicked in. Immediately when we were on the boat, the first thing Sophie said was like, do we have a tourniquet? We need the tourniquet. And to tie a tourniquet on your footless, bleeding friend's leg, I just can't even comprehend what she did in that moment. In addition to Sophie, a first responder from a nearby boat came to help. He had been a snorkeling guide on another boat and had seen us screaming for help. And he actually tried to swim to us, but we got to the boat first because we're D1 swimmers, I guess.

10:29And he was so critical. So Sophie was holding my leg and keeping compression and elevating it. And the first responder, Matthew, was keeping me calm and conscious. and he was asking me questions about my thesis and about the marathon. And I knew that I needed to stay calm. Like, I knew that if I cry and panic and scream, all that was going to do was put me at more risk. And so I worked really hard to calm myself and to stay conscious during that boat ride back to the dock. I think I knew that I was in danger of dying.

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12:17On May 24th, 2023, in the waters off Turks and Caicos, 22-year-old Allie Truitt was attacked by a large shark. Thanks to her years of competitive swimming, Allie made it back to the boat, despite losing her left foot in the attack. But she was still in critical condition. When Allie and her friend Sophie arrived at the dock, an ambulance met them. Sophie got in the ambulance with me, and she rode the entire bumpy ride back with me to the hospital. Once they got to the hospital, Allie called her parents to tell them what happened. So I got on the phone and I said, Mom, I, I, and I kept repeating I.

12:56I tried to tell her what had happened, but I knew that if I said the words, I've been attacked by a shark, that I was going to pass out. I knew that I couldn't say it. And so Sophie took the phone and told my mom what had happened. And my mom started crying on the phone with me, saying, I'm so sorry this has happened. And I said back to her, don't cry. Like, we're not crying yet. We can't yet. Like, we're trying to stay conscious and alert and calm. And we just need to make a plan. Allie's family and friends immediately began working to get her off the island to a hospital that could treat her back in the U.S.

13:32But it was going to take time. They'd need to find a plane and a crew and get her passport from the hotel. In the meantime, Allie's pain was becoming unbearable. I was in massive amounts of pain. Pain that I have never known before. I had asked to not have too much initial medication just because I knew that my family wasn't with me. And so I needed to be alert for those medical decisions. And so the pain was so, so great. There was the pain of where the shark had bit and my open leg. And then there was the pain of the tourniquet. They had tied a tourniquet on me so tight to stop the bleeding, which of course was needed, but was so painful because it was cutting off all blood flow and circulation beneath where they had tied it.

14:15At times I was like, I don't know if the tourniquet is more painful or if the actual bite is more painful. And I remember being on the phone with my mom and being like, I can't do this. Allie's mom is a cognitive behavioral therapist. She stayed on the phone with Allie for hours, coaching her daughter through the waves of pain. I did box breathing a lot, where you'd breathe in for three, hold for three, and breathe out, and that really helped me. And then we also did tons of mantras. So I can and I will was a really, really big one for me. And I would just repeat, I can and I will, I can and I will.

14:47Every time that I would be in these massive bouts of pain and it would ramp up again, we would say, this too shall pass, this too shall pass. And my mom would say, let it wash over you. It will pass. It will pass. After six grueling hours in the island hospital, the plane was ready to medevac Allie to Miami. Sophie wasn't allowed on board, so Allie would have to take the three-and-a-half-hour flight alone. And so my mom left a voicemail with the mantras with, I can and I will, I can and I will. And so that whole flight where I wasn't sure if I was going to survive, I wasn't sure what was going to happen to me, I was not with any friends or family, I was able to repeat those mantras to myself.

15:28Allie arrived at Ryder Trauma Center in Miami around midnight. She was finally able to see her parents and could finally let her guard down. When I was able to be around my parents was the first time I cried since the shark attack because at that moment I was surrounded by people who loved me, who were family, who were going to take care of me, and I knew that I could cry in that moment. But Allie wasn't out of the woods yet by any stretch. Experts can't say for sure what type of shark attacked her, but some think it could have been a bull shark. While shark attacks are incredibly rare, bulls have a reputation for being one of the more aggressive and dangerous species to humans, and are known for their bump and bite behavior.

16:12The shark that attacked Allie severed her foot and part of her lower leg. Miraculously, her foot had been found, still in its flipper, and Allie was hanging on to the hope that it could be reattached. The doctor quickly reoriented us to say that was not a possibility and that, first of all, before we even think about saving your leg, we need to save your life. And that is where everyone's mind needs to be. There is infection risk from the ocean, from shark bacteria. And if that travels up, that has the potential to kill. And hearing that puts things in perspective quickly. Allie needed emergency surgery.

16:48He told me on top of that, there's a 50 % the chance you wake up and your entire leg is gone. Because we don't know what we're going to find when we go into surgery. I think about those moments as just like, in addition to worrying if I was going to survive, there were fears of, is my leg still going to be there when I wake up from surgery? Allie had blood transfusions and two life-saving surgeries in Miami to stabilize her. But doctors recommended a third surgery, a transtibial amputation. It would mean Allie would lose more of her leg, everything halfway below her knee but it would also mean a life of less pain and more mobility with a prosthesis.

17:28Those first two surgeries when I wasn't sure how much of my leg I was going to keep I was so focused on keeping as much as I could. Like I was just like please keep as much as you can I want as much of my leg as I can have and now the decision is actually take another part away to improve my life. It was such a hard decision to be like take more of my leg away when I've already feel like I've lost so much. In the end, Allie decided to have the surgery. On May 31st, seven days after the attack, doctors in New York performed the amputation. It was her 23rd birthday. I think back to those days, and I was so fearful and so worried and so concerned and so unclear about what my future looked like in that moment.

18:10Like, I truthfully didn't even know how I was taking my next step. I thought about all of the big, heavy questions immediately. So was I going to be able to run again? I had just run a marathon. I don't have a foot anymore. Was I going to be able to walk? How was I going to walk? Was it going to be a lifetime of pain? When I had children and I was older, could I run after my children on a prosthetic? Could I carry my baby down the stairs if I can't do stairs well on a prosthetic? A million questions about being an athlete, about being a mother, about my own body image. Sitting in that hospital bed, wondering about what this future was going to look like, Like, it was really hard to envision a happy and bright future for myself at that time.

18:52Like, I had no answers to any of these questions. After the surgery, Allie returned to her parents' house in Connecticut to begin her rehab. I got home, and pulling up the driveway, my driveway was lined with posters from friends and family and balloons and flowers all inside. and I just remember that like in this experience where I was so overwhelmed and over my head of what my life was going to look like, it was this just like huge reminder of the incredible support system that I had with me. I am not a naturally vulnerable person and so learning to let people be there for me through my tears and my hard times and sad times and pain was something I had to learn to do but something that I'm so grateful that I did because it made a world of difference to have all that support.

19:41Still, Allie faced a tough road to recovery. Those early weeks, I was in massive pain. I was incredibly sad and grieving the loss of my leg. And because of night terrors and flashbacks to the attack, I was not sleeping really at all at night, and that was really, really hard. And the pain would get worse at night, and that was really hard. There were days where I spent the entire day crying on a couch. But the competitor in Allie began to surface. I think probably driven by life as an athlete and in the sport, I knew that I had it in me to continue to physically fight to stay strong. And so I was doing three physical therapy sessions a week.

20:22In those early days, I had to relearn everything. We would spend like an hour of physical therapy literally laying on a bed and trying to extend my leg straight as far as I could. Relearning how to do the simplest of movements with new nerve endings and new muscle attachments took hours. Anything that touched my leg, like a gust of wind, would send what felt like electric shocks throughout my leg and would create all this pain. And so I had to start by rubbing a fuzzy blanket on my leg for like 10 minutes of physical therapy to get the nerves adjusted. And then we graduated to a towel. We slowly built up so that my leg could be touched by different textures and be okay.

20:59In addition to her physical recovery, Allie was still struggling with the loss of her limb. As a 23-year-old girl, just the body image, pain in those early weeks, like I would stare at myself in the mirror and be like, I'm so ugly now. No one will ever find me attractive like this, and no one's ever going to want to date me. I gave my parents all my short skirts and short dresses, and I was like, take them to Goodwill, take them to the basement. I'm never wearing them again because no one's going to see my prosthetic leg. Like, I can't do that. Just looking at her amputated leg was incredibly difficult for Allie.

21:34Across the three hospitals, not once until the day I left, did I look at my amputated leg. I would wear a sleeping eye mask in the hospital when the doctors would come in so that I didn't have to look. So I started in that place of like, I won't even look at it. And then I had to grow. I literally would practice just looking at my leg for 30 seconds. And then when I would sit on a couch, if my leg hung straight down, the blood rush was so painful. And so we would time like 14 seconds of me hanging my leg off the couch. To think back now and think that we were celebrating me hanging my leg for 12 seconds is crazy.

22:10But we celebrated every small win in those early days just to help me kind of get to a place where I could grow from there. Allie was making strides in her rehab. But even so, the trauma of the shark attack was never far away. The sound of water even taking a shower would trigger flashbacks. And for me, that was really hard because I was like, have I lost my love of the water? Is that gone with this too? Like I've lost my foot and now I've lost something that I've loved my entire life. And this safe space and happy place and free place for me is now gone too.

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23:30Allie Truitt still had a long way to go to recover from the shark attack that took her left foot and part of her left leg. She had gone from being excited about living the life of a 20-something in New York City to needing crutches and a walker just to get around her parents' house. She looked forward to getting a prosthetic leg because she knew it could help her regain some independence. She also wanted to swim again. I felt like I had lost a lot in the attack and things that I was never going to get back. So my foot. I'm never getting my foot back. But there were also things that I had lost that I knew I could fight to reclaim.