12-year-old left ‘bleeding everywhere’ after suspected shark bite at Maryland beach

What started off as any other family vacation quickly turned into 42 stitches for one 12-year-old girl after a suspected shark bite at a popular Maryland beach.

Pennsylvania native Jordan Prushinski was swimming and boogie boarding in Ocean City with her family on Monday when she felt something sharp brush up against her leg, WBRE reports.

“I didn’t really realize what was going on until I was on the beach and I was bleeding everywhere,” Prushinski told the TV station. “I was swimming and a wave had just crashed and I was right on the edge of the crash zone. I thought a horseshoe crab had got lifted up and hit against my shins, and I don’t like the sea creatures, so I rushed out immediately to find blood everywhere, with cuts all over my left leg.”

The girl’s mother, Melissa Prushinski, told the TV station that an EMT and a nurse gave the 12-year-old first aid. The Ocean City Beach Patrol was also there to assist.

Jordan Prushinski was taken to Atlantic General Hospital in Berlin, Maryland, where she received 42 stitches for 20 cuts, according to WBRE.

Melissa Prushinski told the Times-Tribune that “the ER doctor told me this was a shark bite” and that “nothing else would make this wound.”

Wanting more confirmation, she sent photos of her daughter’s wounds to a shark expert in New Jersey, the newspaper reports.

“It was definitely a shark,” Marie Levine, founder of the Shark Research Institute, told the newspaper.

Levine has been researching and swimming uncaged with sharks for 49 years. She thinks it was a blacktip shark that bit Jordan, according to the newspaper.

“What happened to Jordan was a mistake,” Levine told the newspaper. “I’m sure it was mistaken identity. There’s a difference between a predatory attack and a bite when you bump into each other and the shark is frightened.”

Ocean City Beach Patrol Captain Butch Arbin told WBAL-TV it appears the bite was from a “small sandbar shark” but said he wouldn’t classify it as a shark attack — since it was “accidental.”

Shark scientists have urged the public to use less sensational language when a shark bites a person, especially since these sea creatures’ population numbers have plummeted by 71% since 1970, largely from overfishing, according to the New York Times.

Researchers and wildlife officials in both the United States and Australia instead use terms like “bites,” “incidents” and “encounters” rather than “shark attack.”

Scientists say they choose their language based on accuracy, not because of “political correctness or pressure from activists.”

“There’s a real disconnect between the human imagination of shark attacks and the reality of it,” Toby Daly-Engel, the director of the Florida Tech Shark Conservation Lab, told the New York Times. “A lot of what’s called a shark attack in society is actually provoked by humans.”

Shark bites are rare, researchers say. “Globally, there are about 70 to 80 unprovoked bites a year, and about five deaths,” the New York Times reports.

In the meantime, Jordan Prushinski is erring on the side of caution.

“I’m kind of, like, wanting to stay out of the water for a little while, but something like this is rare and it’s even rarer to happen again,” she told CBS Baltimore.

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