You would think that surviving a shark attack would be the hardest part. But a Virginia woman is struggling to get a prosthetic hand after insurance rejected paying for the attachment.
This comes after a shark bit off the woman's lower left arm. She lost her arm after a trip to the beach last June turned to tragedy. Following the accident, her health insurance company, Cigna Healthcare, refused to pay for a $73,000 myoelectric prosthetic hand.
"I just felt so deflated, I don't know how else to describe it," Elisabeth Foley told The New York Post. "This was certainly one of the lowest points of this entire experience I've had. It's insane and so frustrating, because I paid for health insurance my entire life, and had the healthiest life, so I barely used it. But I need their help now, and they won't help me."
Shark Attack
Reflecting on the shark attack, Foley said she had been at Watersound, Florida when she saw the creature.
"It looked like a torpedo in the water," Foley recalled. "It was huge." It bit her between the legs, causing her to fight back. Foley said she "punched at it with [her] left hand, because I had read they'll go away if you hit them in the nose.It grabbed me by the hand and pulled me underwater. I thought I was going to die. I called out to God, 'Please, let me live.'"
She ended up losing her arm in the moment. Fortunately, her husband ended up pulling her to shore.
"I remember seeing a group of people in bathing suits, working on me," she said. "If they hadn't been there, I certainly would have bled out, because it took 20 minutes for EMS to get there."
Right now, she's using a prosthetic hook. But she said, following the shark attack, the new prosthetic would allow her to have mobility thanks to electrical signals. "We don't think about how often we use our hands to do tasks until you lose one," said Foley.
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In a statement, a Cigna Healthcare spokesperson said, "While many of our health plans cover a number of prosthetic options, we are evaluating benefit updates to help expand coverage of advanced prosthetics for more people."
