It was a perfect California beach day.
On Tuesday, July 8, the hot sun shone in a clear blue sky. The sand bars at Huntington Beach were crowded with swimmers and surfers. Fitchburg resident Eugene Finney treaded water in the ocean, watching his daughter swim.
Finney, who works at the Fitchburg Art Museum, had taken his children and his girlfriend, Emeline McKeown, on vacation to visit his parents in California.
That particular day, McKeown was on the beach with Finney’s 6-year-old son Turner, and Finney was out in the water with his 10-year-old daughter, Temple.
“The surf was pretty big that day,” said Finney, 39. “The waves were about 7 to 9 feet, and the water is pretty deep. You can’t touch the bottom.”
He and Temple dove into a cresting wave, Finney’s arms around his daughter to brace her against the strong current. They were underwater, about 20 feet down, when Finney felt something slam into his back.
“Harder than I’ve ever been hit in my life,” he said.
As he fought through pain and confusion to get himself and his daughter back up to the surface, Finney had no idea what might have hit him. Even when Temple pointed out the long, bleeding gash on his back as they left the water, Finney was too dazed to process what had just happened.
Then, while he rinsed off his wound in a beach shower, his girlfriend noticed a crowd forming at the edge of the water. Turner asked her what was going on. McKeown looked out into the waves.
Shark fins.
“The lifeguards started pulling everybody out of the water,” McKeown said. “Everybody was calling their kids back in.”
Had Finney actually been attacked by a shark? He was skeptical.
A day later, though, a professional surfer was similarly attacked at the same Orange County beach. It was determined that a great white shark was responsible. The beach was closed down. The story was all over the news.
The pain in Finney’s back, abdomen and upper body worsened with each passing day. On the plane ride home Sunday night, the pressurized air in the cabin made things worse. Finney was unable to sleep.
He could not have dreamed that the agony would ultimately be worth it.
On July 13, Finney returned to his job as marketing coordinator for the art museum. He planned to work through the pain, but when he told Museum Director Nick Capasso about the shark attack, Capasso insisted that Finney go to a hospital.
“I said, I guess I’m going to have to go to the doctor after work,” Finney said. “Nick told me, ‘No, you’re going to the doctor now. You don’t look good.'”
Lightheaded and half-delirious from pain, Finney drove to St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton. He knew it wasn’t a good idea to drive in his condition, but he wanted to be at a hospital near McKeown’s Newton home.
“I knew if something were to happen, I would need Emeline to take care of me,” said Finney, who lives in Fitchburg.
He checked himself into the emergency room and let the doctors take over.
They ran a barrage of tests — an EKG, a chest X-ray, a CAT scan — to determine what was causing his pain.
“At that point, I wasn’t even convinced it was the shark anymore,” he said.
After a long, exhausting day, doctors determined that Finney’s chest and back pain was the result of “interior bruising of the thoracic cavity, due to blunt-force trauma.”
Then, they told him they had found something else: a tumor on his kidney.
Click here to continue reading…
SOURCE: Anna Burgess
SENTINEL & ENTERPRISE
When you purchase a book below it supports the Number #1 Black Christian Newspaper BLACK CHRISTIAN NEWS NETWORK ONE (BCNN1.com) and it also allows us to spread the Gospel around the world.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
