As the men carried Aaron ashore, Don gripped the boy’s upper arm to stem the blood flow. They drove to a nearby fire station, where a Memorial Hermann Life Flight helicopter and crew of critical-care nurses arrived to transport him.
Within two hours, Aaron was in an operating room at Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital. A team led by microsurgeon Emmanuel Melissinos, MD, identified and tagged 25 muscles, two arteries, six veins and three primary nerve groups cut by the shark’s jagged teeth.
During a four-and-a-half-hour surgery, the team restored circulation by repairing the blood vessels, then painstakingly reattached nerves and muscles. By the time Aaron left the hospital a week later, he was recovering faster than expected. “He was determined to do it,” says his mother, Thelma. “He just set his mind on recovery and never looked back.”
During six months of physical therapy following the shark attack, Aaron and his family concentrated on recovery at home, following doctor’s orders to the letter. By January, he was shooting hoops with a recreational basketball league and playing the piano again.
Aaron owes his remarkable recovery to a positive attitude, his youth, his family’s support and the fact that no one panicked at the beach, including Aaron, who calmly asked others to pray for him.
“Everybody around him responded appropriately and brought him to the hospital in the best possible shape, which made our work easier,” says Melissinos, who founded the microsurgery program at Memorial Hermann 26 years ago.
Now, more than a year after the attack, life is almost back to normal for Aaron and his family. Aaron is fishing as much as ever, although he’s more cautious in the water now.
“I’m not going to let fear overtake me,” he had said early on. True to his word, he went swimming at Bryan Beach on the following Fourth of July.
“We’re very proud of him,” his mother says. “The experience hasn’t affected him in a bad way. He lives his life. He doesn’t complain. He does everything.”
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