Crafton woman on road to recovery after Myrtle Beach shark attack

Karren Sites was enjoying her first full day of vacation on Myrtle Beach with her family on Aug. 15 when the unthinkable occurred.

“I was in the water, maybe up to my hips,” Sites, 55, of Crafton told the Tribune-Review on Wednesday. “I felt a sharp, intense pain on my arm. I looked over and there was a shark attached to my arm.

“I just batted it with my free hand a couple times and it did release.”

At first, Sites said she didn’t know what was happening. Perhaps a jellyfish had stung her. Then she saw the shark.

“It all happens in a second,” she said. “A million things run through your head.”

An emergency room nurse who happened to be on the beach helped clean the wound with bottled water until an ambulance arrived to take Sites to a nearby hospital. Sites said she was afraid to look at the damage the shark had done to her arm.

“It was a gruesome wound,” Sites said, explaining that the animal had taken a “chunk” of flesh with its bite.

At the hospital in South Carolina, Sites said, her arm was cleaned and stitched. Her road to recovery, however, was not over.

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“I have some damage on my ring finger,” Sites said, explaining she had surgery last week at South Hills Orthopaedic Surgery Associates to try to repair it. “It wouldn’t move correctly. It kind of just hung there.”

She won’t know how the successful the surgery was until her next appointment. Sites. who works as a mortgage loan officer, said she’ll be wearing a brace on the hand for “quite a while.”

Sites said she loves the ocean so much that she can’t imagine not visiting again. She said, though, that the shark attack was “traumatizing.”

Before the attack, she had never really worried about sharks.

“My grandkids were saying when we got to the beach that day, ‘What about sharks?’ I kept saying, ‘There are no sharks here. Don’t worry about sharks. It’s so overblown. Nobody ever gets bit,’” Sites said.

Her grandson, Brian Sites, 8, had been in the water with her moments before the attack. He had just walked back to shore and was standing at the edge of the water when the shark attacked, Sites said. He saw the entire incident. The ordeal left him nervous about the water, Sites said.

Sites said her grandson told her that he watched the shark jump out of the water to bite her. His description of the attack, and what she saw of the shark, led them to believe the shark that bit her was a blacktip shark.

“They tend to swim in shallow water,” Sites explained. “This shark was probably two or three feet (long). They don’t get that big, but they’re one of the few ones that are known to jump out of the water and bite.”

Sites was bitten on a Monday and discharged from the hospital the following day. She still wanted to salvage some vacation time, and stayed in Myrtle Beach till the family drove home that Friday.

As she recovers from her injuries, Sites said she joined a Facebook group called “The Bite Club,” which invites people from around the world who have been bitten by sharks or injured by other big animals to connect in a virtual support group.

“It’s nice to find somebody who knows what you’re going through,” Sites said.