Marshalltown woman after shark bite: ‘I was dying’

In the 11 years Heidi Ernst has been scuba diving — racking up more than 500 dives — the 73-year-old Marshalltown woman has seen a lot of sharks. Mostly Caribbean reef sharks, common off the coast of Grand Bahama island — where she’s done all her diving with the same dive operator since her first underwater expedition hooked her.

They’re beautiful, like the other fish and reefs and ocean flora that welcome Ernst and her fellow divers to swim among them and snap their photos.

“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 … They just swim up and swim off to the side or over the top … I've never felt any danger.”

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The same was true June 7, when Ernst was back in the Bahamas. After diving at the day’s first site, Ernst and her team moved to a second site — which is known widely as “shark junction” and promoted as a shark-dive site.

Upon arrival, the divers noticed a glass-bottomed boat of tourists hand-feeding sharks at the surface so they could get a closer look. That compelled the divers to extend their “surface interval” between dives, allowing the “feeding frenzy” to subside. Once it did, the divers resumed their plans — which went off without a hitch as they mingled with the animals and snapped pictures of the reef.

Once they came up, Ernst took off her dive suit and jumped back in for a quick dip. But when she starting climbing the ladder to return to the boat, a shark got a hold of her leg, shaking its head side to side.

Ernst instinctively hit the shark, and it let go — allowing her to scramble into the back of the boat and make a quick assessment that this was “very very serious.”

“There was blood everywhere,” she said. “I was dying. I was going to bleed to death. I was afraid I was going to die and was in severe pain.”

Her dive master immediately administered first aid, putting a tourniquet around Ernst’s leg “because the blood vessels were severed.” The dive operator’s wife called for an ambulance to meet them at the dock, while Ernst’s friends did what they could to keep her conscious.

“It’s just what you do when somebody is in dire need,” she said. “You hold them and you comfort them and you tell them, ‘Just stay with it,’ so you don't drift off.”

Giving her their hands and prayers, Ernst said the other divers held her gaze to keep her awake.

“They were very instrumental in keeping me alive,” she said. “Everybody was.”

‘Take my leg off’

Even with a tourniquet, Ernst said, she was in danger and needed urgent care from a local hospital to get her stabilized. Following two initial surgeries, Ernst was airlifted the following day to Miami, where an ambulance rushed her to Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital.

It was there that she spoke with doctors about how to proceed.

“I made the decision with the surgeon to take my leg off,” Ernst told The Gazette from her hospital bed in Miami. “It was evident that it could not be saved.”

A physical therapist for 36 years — having spent her career in health care, including years with the Marshalltown hospital and the last decade with Sunny Hill Care Center in Tama — Ernst came to the discussion and decision knowing how to advocate for her best outcome.

“They have all these teams at this hospital. It's not just one doctor that shows up and makes a decision,” she said. “It’s the trauma team, the orthopedic team, the vascular team, the prosthetic team.”

And after they evaluated her condition, Ernst said, the vascular surgeon gave what became her guiding assessment.

“He did not think that it would be a good idea to try and save the leg because of future problems with infection,” she said. “That what I had left was enough to provide for good outcomes.

“So I said, ‘Yeah, let’s just do it. Let’s just amputate’,” she said. “And that night they took me into the operating room and did it.”

Ernst lost her foot and leg from the shin down, leaving her a small portion of leg below the knee “to accommodate a prosthesis.”

Thursday afternoon, Ernst went into her sixth surgery — to “finalize and close up the stump.”

“They’re going to do all of the rerouting of the nerves and making sure everything is lined up properly and then close up the wound,” she said, indicating the operation and recovery will keep her in Miami through next week.

‘I can do this’

After that, though, Ernst plans to return to the home in Marshalltown she built with her husband, Bill Ernst, who died of cancer not quite four years ago. Originally from Switzerland, Heidi Ernst met her late husband in Marshalltown and they married 30 years before he died.

Now living alone and in her 70s, Ernst has stayed as active as ever — powerlifting, swimming, and teaching a class at the Marshalltown YMCA-YWCA. But scuba diving, she said, “that’s my biggest passion.”

“I do that several times a year,” she said. “And I plan to go back to it too. I don’t think this is going to hold me back.”

The attack, Ernst said, hasn’t made her afraid.

“I don’t blame the shark,” she said. “It's humans who teach animals to do certain behaviors.”

Tourists had just been hand feeding sharks at the surface, from a boat.

“For a shark to come up to the surface is not a natural thing,” Ernst said. “But the shark knew that there was food to be had at a boat. And he thought my leg was the food.”

Given her background in physical therapy, Ernst said, she’s not naive about the path forward.

“I'm realistic,” she said. “I know what's going to happen down the road … I know what I can expect. And I know that I have to work hard to get back to where I was.”

She also knows, though, “I can do this.”

“Life is going to be a little different,” she said. “My life was different after my husband died. It was very different. And so now it's going to be a little different again.

“But, you know, that's how life goes.”

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Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com