A 12-year-old girl is on the road to recovery after she received 42 stitches in what her family believes was an encounter with a shark in Ocean City, Maryland.

“I didn’t really realize what was going on until I was on the beach and I was bleeding everywhere,” she said. “I thought a horseshoe crab had got lifted up and hit against my shins, and I don’t like the sea creatures, so I rushed out immediately to find blood everywhere, with cuts all over my left leg.”

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Mom Melissa Prushinski was able to quickly gather a team of helpers, including an EMT and a nurse, who joined forces to give Jordan first aid and get her bandaged up.

“She was definitely a rock star. She kind of held it together,” Brooke Rathell, a registered nurse vacationing at the beach that day with her paramedic husband, toldWBRE. “It was more the sight of it, so my husband held the towel there with mom and I irrigated the wound and both the lifeguard and I and my husband and then the supervisor kind of wrapped everything up.”

Ocean City Beach Patrol Capt. Butch Arbin confirmed the incident happened around 4:30 p.m., and that Beach Patrol was able to get Jordan to her family’s vehicle so she could be taken to the hospital, theSalisbury Daily Timesreported.

Jordan, who will start seventh grade in the fall, received 42 stitches for the 20 cuts on her leg at Atlantic General Hospital in Berlin, WBRE reported.

“I’m kind of like, wanting to stay out of the water for a little while, but something like this is rare and it’s even rarer to happen again,” she told the outlet.

“It gives me a good story to tell my friends,” she added to NBC affiliateWRDE.

It was likely a black tip shark that bit Jordan, Marie Levine, executive director of the Shark Research Institute, told WBRE.

Arbin said Beach Patrol believes that if it was indeed a shark that bit Jordan, it was not an attack due to the size of the cuts and the fact that the animal let go, theDaily Timesreported.

The odds of dying from a shark attack are 1 in 3.7 million, according to theNational Safety Council.

source: people.com