Iowa woman Heidi Ernst loses leg in Bahamas shark attack

An Iowa woman vacationing in the Bahamas lost her leg after being savagely attacked by a shark and nearly bleeding to death at the end of a diving excursion.

Heidi Ernst, 73, was scuba diving off Taino Beach on June 7 when a shark clamped down on her left calf.

The attack happened as Ernst, an expert scuba diver who had just completed her 500th dive in May, was standing on a ladder to get back onto the boat.

Ernst told the Iowa news station KCCI that she could see the predator thrashing in the water and she hit it with her hand to scare it off.

As soon as she made it back on the boat, Ernst said she knew her leg could not be saved.

“There was blood everywhere,” she recounted in a separate interview with The Gazette from her hospital bed in Miami. “I was dying. I was going to bleed to death. I was afraid I was going to die and was in severe pain.”

A crew member administered first aid to the badly injured woman by tying a tourniquet around her leg that “kept her from bleeding to death,” according to a GoFundMe page.

After she was stabilized, Ernst was taken to Rand Memorial Hospital, before being transported by an air ambulance to Jackson Ryder Trauma Center in Miami, where doctors were forced to amputate her leg because of the extent of the injury and the high risk of infection.

“I made the decision with the surgeon to take my leg off,” said Ernst, who has worked as a physical therapist for nearly four decades. “It was evident that it could not be saved.”

“So I said, ‘Yeah, let’s just do it. Let’s just amputate,’” she added.

Ernst said she’s been diving for 11 years off the coast of Grand Bahama island and has never feared sharks.

“They haven’t shown any aggressive behavior toward divers,” Ernst told The Gazette. “They swim around us. We take pictures of them. They don’t threaten us… I’ve never felt any danger.”

Ernst’s Facebook page is filled with photos capturing her underwater adventures, including multiple encounters with huge sharks.

Ernst said she does not blame the shark that bit her — and she has no plans to turn her back on diving, which she called her “biggest passion.”

“I don’t think this is going to hold me back,” she said.

The woman, who’s a recent widow,  has now undergone six surgeries, the latest one on Thursday to close up her stump.

She will remain in the Miami hospital through next week, before returning home to Marshalltown, Iowa, to continue her recovery, which will involve physical therapy and being fitted for a prosthesis down the road.

 “I can do this,” Ernst said.