A shark attack saved me from dying of cancer

A shark attack ended up saving a man’s life.

In July 2015, Eugene Finney was swimming off the coast of Huntington Beach, California, when he felt something smash into his back, the Washington Post reported.

“I would say it’s like being hit by a ton of bricks, or like whiplash from a car, but it’s not that,” Finney told the newspaper. “I’ve never been hit like that before.”

It wasn’t until after he got out of the water and his daughter asked him why he was bleeding that Finney noticed a cut down his back about a foot long. 

His son and girlfriend, who were on shore the entire time, mentioned seeing shark fins in the water. The next day, there was a report of a surfer being bumped by a great white shark. That’s when he realized that that shark or another one had likely struck him.

But soon after his close call with the ocean’s deadliest predator, Finney had a hard time breathing and was experiencing chest pains. He went to the emergency room.

A CAT scan revealed a small cancerous tumor on his right kidney. Finney, then 39, was told that he had a good chance of recovering from the disease due to the fact that it was caught early and its size. Surgeons subsequently removed the mass and about 20% of Finney’s kidney along with it.

The incident was “a sign from Mother Nature” that brought him to the hospital, he told the Washington Post.

“Otherwise I would never have gone in, and they wouldn’t have caught it … The only real way I would have found out was the tumor growing so large it was metastasizing and spreading,” he said.

Finney said that if he had waited, he likely would not have known it was cancer until it would have been at stage 4 status.

“I would have started losing weight and getting sick and at that point it would have been too late. If I could find this shark and give it a hug, I would,” he said.