Of all the movies 15-year-old Lulu Gribbin watched, there was one which always gave her the shivers – 47 Meters Down, a film about two sisters trapped in a diving cage as killer sharks circled menacingly.
It ‘really scarred me,’ she says today.
So much so that when Lulu, her identical twin sister Ellie and a group of friends headed to the beach in June 2024, she admits she ‘stayed where I could touch the bottom of the ocean because I was scared’.
Many of us will identify with Lulu’s fears. The thought of being attacked by a shark is enough to prompt an almost primal terror, despite such attacks being relatively rare.
However, on that summer’s day on Florida’s Seacrest Beach, Lulu’s fears were to prove well-founded.
The details of what happened to her are horrifying. In shallow waters – Lulu was swimming at mere waist-height – she was attacked by a bull shark, which tore off her left hand, and then part of her right leg.
She remembers little of the attack itself, something she attributes to being in shock. She can’t recall what must have been extraordinary pain. She didn’t even see the shark.
All she recalls is its shadow, and then, raising her left arm out of the water, looking at it and realising: ‘There was no hand there. It was just flesh and bone sticking out.’
The attack saw Lulu lose two thirds of her blood – in the sea, it spread out to cover an area the size of a swimming pool. Yet miraculously, somehow, she survived.
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Lulu Gribbin was swimming at waist-height when she was attacked by a bull shark, which tore off her left hand and then part of her right leg
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Lulu before the shark attack
As Lulu’s mother, Ann Blair, tells me: ‘Lulu’s femoral artery [the main artery in the thigh] was severed in half. Typically when that happens you bleed out in 30 seconds. Medically, she shouldn’t be here. But she is.’
Lulu’s story only becomes more astonishing when you consider how well she has coped since her ordeal, showing physical and mental strength that belie her youth.
Indeed, just 11 months after the attack, having adapted to a new life with prosthetic limbs, Lulu returned to the spot where her life had changed irrevocably.
There, she lay on the beach while Ellie cradled her head, a reenactment of the moments after the shark struck when Ellie pleaded for her twin to fight for life.
A bull shark prowls the waters off the coast of Florida
The visit, says Lulu, now 17, ‘was freeing and it relieved a lot of weight from my shoulders’.
‘It was very emotional… and, in a way, healing,’ adds Ellie.
We chat over Zoom from the twins’ hometown, Mountain Brook, in Birmingham, Alabama, around four hours from the beach where she was attacked.
Of the moment that changed her life, Lulu recalls that she was on a family holiday splashing in the shallows when there was a scream from one of her friends: ‘Shark!’ Frantically, everyone began swimming to shore.
Lulu says these minutes are ‘like a fever dream in my brain’. After the cry went up, she says the shark seemed to catch her immediately, but ‘in hindsight, it [took a few] seconds’.
She knew that frenetic movement in the water was more likely to attract a shark, so, agonisingly, she had slowed her movements as she approached the beach. But it was too little, too late.
‘I was in complete shock,’ she admits. ‘My brain knew what was happening, but my body just couldn’t respond. Once I realised it had caught me, I couldn’t call for help, speak, swim, do anything.’
It was then – with the shark still attached to her leg – that she lifted her arm out of the water, and saw her hand was gone.
She tried to call out, but the words would not come. All the while the shark bit at her.
Then, a bystander, Stephen Beene, saw her distress and rushed to her. ‘He saved me,’ she says. ‘The shark was attached to my leg at the time and he punched it to release me.
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At the hospital, doctors informed Lulu’s mother of the loss of her daughter’s hand, and if they chose to save her right leg, amputation would be inevitable within the year
‘Another man came. I blacked out as he was carrying me to the shore. I woke up to see strangers applying tourniquets to my limbs and holding my hand.’
Ellie, who had been swimming ahead of her sister, had reached the shore, ‘and I just looked out and saw a pool of red water. I thought: “Something terrible’s happened,” but I didn’t know it was Lulu’.
When she discovered the blood was her sister’s, she began to scream, a noise she only stopped when Lulu was laid on the sand. ‘I was cradling her head and telling her: “You’ve got this. Just keep breathing. You’re doing amazingly.” I was just trying to keep her mind off what was going on.’
Others covered up Lulu’s missing hand and severely injured leg. ‘I just tried to keep my eyes locked with Lulu’s,’ recalls Ellie.
Lulu’s luck changed at this point. She was blessed to have three medics among bystanders.
Maternity nurse Delanie Quinnelly rushed to her aid after hearing the screams, and ordered onlookers to provide T-shirts and towels to make tourniquets to stem the bleeding from Lulu’s leg and arm.
A radiologist, Mohammad Ali, and his friend, family doctor Ryan Forbess, were on the beach with their families when they heard the commotion. Mohammad leaned on Lulu’s femoral artery to cinch it shut and tied a tourniquet around her upper leg using a strap that had tied beach chairs together.
Ryan checked Lulu’s pulse, readying himself to give chest compressions if her heart started to fail. Lulu refers to them today as ‘the angels on the beach’.
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It’s a mark of Lulu’s tenacious spirit that her first words when she woke from the surgery were: ‘I made it’
Her mother, though, was still unaware of her daughter’s fate – as she had foregone the swim to get lunch with other mums. When Ann Blair’s friend Ellen tried to call her two daughters who were on the trip, they weren’t answering their phones.
Sensing something was wrong, she started to run towards the beach. It was then that she spotted the crowd.
‘Normally, people wouldn’t be standing on the shore staring at the water. It was like [a scene] you’d see in Jaws,’ she says.
Running over, she saw her daughter lying on the ground, ‘looking like a ghost, really. She was so white.’
Ellie ran to her mother, telling her Lulu was going to be OK, ‘but I was just screaming’, Ann Blair recalls.
Lulu’s arm was covered up, but her mother saw the blood and mangled flesh of what remained of her leg.
‘From her mid-thigh to her knee there was just a bone. There was nothing there. I mean, I can picture it now. I doubt I’ll ever unsee [it].’
Paramedics arrived in minutes, and Lulu was airlifted to hospital while her family and friends made the tortuous hour and 20 minute journey in pursuit.
On arrival, doctors informed Ann Blair of the loss of her daughter’s hand. More was to come: if they chose to save Lulu’s right leg now, amputation would be inevitable within the year, such was the damage. The decision was made to amputate.
Her father, who had not gone on the trip, was informed, and made his way to hospital not knowing, he says, ‘if I was going to see my daughter, or get her body’. Lulu regained consciousness the next morning and, says Ann Blair, ‘she knew her arm was gone in the water’.
‘She didn’t know about her leg until after it was amputated. I remember she woke in the middle of the night and did the scissor motion to me around her leg. Heartbreakingly I had to say, “Yes, your leg is gone.”’
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Fifteen weeks after the shark attack, Lulu returned to school with her twin, Ellie
When she finally gathered the courage to inspect her limbs ‘it just kind of weirded me out,’ says Lulu, her maturity dissolving for a moment. ‘It altered my brain a little.’
‘But,’ she adds resolutely, ‘I could also look down and see a future and that everything was going to be all right.’
Indeed, it’s a mark of her tenacious spirit that her first words when she woke were: ‘I made it.’ That she remained so positive is something she attributes to seeing patients with worse injuries than her when she was transferred to a rehab centre for amputees. She tells me, with astonishing resolve, of others who were ‘paralysed or had brain injuries’.
‘I just tried to laugh and make other people joyful because a lot of them had just had their lives ruined.’
Nine surgeries followed for Lulu. ‘They were just getting out the infection from the ocean water and the shark’s mouth,’ she shrugs. What was more significant was the phantom limb pain she felt. Experienced by up to 80 per cent of amputees, the presence of their missing limb is still ‘felt’, as well as stabbing or itching sensations. ‘I would feel [my leg] squeezing itself… [it felt] like it was on fire,’ she says.
Relearning how to walk three months after the loss of her limbs was, explains Lulu, ‘one of the hardest parts of my journey’.
For Ann Blair, watching her daughter learning to walk again was ‘very emotional’.
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An avid sportswoman, Lulu’s accident has helped her golf swing. Removing her prosthetic leg, ‘allows for more rotation, and helps me to hit the ball further’.
‘We were all there and the doctors were there and we all just embraced and cried.’ After just 77 days in rehab, in August 2024, Lulu was discharged and walked out on her prosthetic leg.
Her progress was astonishing: amputees normally take a year or more to master walking on prosthetics. ‘She is definitely a headstrong child,’ Ann Blair laughs.
‘But I think that has served her well in this situation.’
When she returned home, just over two months after the attack, a parade was held in her honour, with everyone wearing purple, her favourite colour.
She missed just a month of school. Although she has had to learn ‘basically everything you don’t think about’, as she puts it – from using the bathroom to tying shoelaces. There have also been certain perks.
Not only do her prosthetics ‘look cool’, but ‘they do stuff regular arms and legs can’t do’.
‘I have this button on my leg and I can turn it upside down to help me put on shoes. I have a rotating wrist on my arm which can turn in a full circle as many times as I want!’
An avid sportswoman, Lulu’s accident has helped her golf swing. Removing her prosthetic leg, ‘allows for more rotation, and helps me to hit the ball further’.
For Taylor Swift fan Lulu, the ultimate dream occurred when, on hearing of her situation, the singer’s mother, Andrea, invited Lulu and her family to her daughter’s Eras Tour concert last November. ‘We got to sit with Taylor’s parents and her family,’ says Lulu. ‘They were very sweet and we all got to dance together.’
Lulu insists it’s not ‘very often’ she wishes she could turn back the clock. ‘Obviously, there are some moments where I wish I had the best of both worlds – where I could have this life, as well as two legs and two arms,’ she adds.
‘But I try to just look on the bright side… I don’t really feel any pain any more, but it’s frustrating some days when my prosthetic’s not working the way I want it to work.’
The family have started the Lulu Strong Foundation, aiming to bridge the gap between the technology that has been invented and what is actually accessible –and affordable – for amputees.
They have also successfully fought for the creation of a shark attack alert system in Alabama entitled Lulu’s Law, which they hope will go nationwide. While attacks are extremely rare in their area, they later learned another had occurred nearby just 90 minutes before Lulu’s.
‘After we heard that, we were very upset,’ says Ann Blair.
‘If I had known there was a shark attack on the beach, [the girls] wouldn’t have been in the water.’ With their new alert system, mobile phones will warn people nearby in the event of a shark attack.
Today, Lulu’s hopes for the future include entering the Paralympics, ‘although I don’t know exactly what event yet, but I’m open to everything’.
The accident has, she says, drawn her family ‘even closer together’. Yet they are loath to treat Lulu differently.
After the attack, she would receive gifts from well-wishers, and, says Ann Blair, ‘my other children would say, “Why does she get all that?”’
She laughs. ‘I’m like, “Come on guys – she lost an arm and a leg. You’ve got to give her a break!”’
