February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Andrew Bushe
DUBLIN — An Irish surgeon was part of a team of doctors who reattached the arm of an 8-year-old Mississippi boy after it was retrieved from the stomach of the shark that had severed it off the Florida coast on Friday evening.
Dr. Ian Rogers, a Dublin-born plastic surgeon, was one of the medical team in Pensacola Baptist Hospital involved in the 12-hour operation on Jesse Arbogast after a bull shark attacked the boy while he swam at Gulf Islands National Seashore near Fort Pickens in the Florida Panhandle.
Rogers, who has worked in the hospital since 1986, said he was "absolutely amazed" at how clean-cut the boy’s right arm was after it was recovered from the shark’s gullet.
"Typically you would expect shark bites to be very jagged," he said. "This limb was essentially torn off and swallowed by the shark."
Jesse’s uncle wrestled with the 7-foot shark and dragged it ashore after the attack in waist-high water. A Ranger shot the shark three times in the head. The shark’s jaws were pried open and held apart with a truncheon.
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"They reached down into the stomach and took out the limb," Rogers said. "So it was in very good condition considering what you might expect it to be like. It had been swallowed in one piece."
A hospital spokesperson said the boy had no pulse or blood pressure when he arrived at the hospital. Rogers said surgeons had to work to reattach bone, muscles, nerves and blood supply.
"Little Jesse sustained a terrible injury," Rogers said. "No only did it amputate his arm, but the shark also took a big bite out his thigh. He was in shock at the time he was picked up by our helicopter."
Rogers said Jesse was stable after the operation. He is still on a ventilator but is responding by blinking and moving his feet.
It could take up to two years before the full effectiveness of the reattaching of the boy’s arm could be assessed, Rogers said.
The International Shark Attack File lists 79 confirmed shark attacks, 10 of them fatal, worldwide last year, the highest in four decades that the records have been kept. Thirty-four of those attacks took place in Florida.
Bob Hueter, director of the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., said summer is the worst time of year for encounters between sharks and swimmers along the Gulf Coast and Southeast Florida because sharks are hunting along their migratory roots.