A Southern California woman who survived the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history at the Route 91 music festival in Las Vegas defied the odds again after surviving a shark attack in Hawaii.
What's more, even after the shark left 70 staples and 50 stitches in Kimberly Bishop's leg, she said she won't let this stop her from getting back in the ocean.
A month ago, Kimberly and her husband, also named Kim, were kayaking in Anaehoomalu Bay, near Waikoloa on vacation at their home on the Big Island.
"That particular day, there was no wind. The water was smooth, and we said, 'let's go out. It will be a great day for an adventure,'" Kimberly, 65, recalls while flashing a megawatt smile. "I didn't see a thing. It was clear all the way to the bottom."
Suddenly, something knocked her kayak right over.
"I felt something like a truck hit my kayak and flip it over completely. I flipped over toward whatever had hit me, and immediately felt a chomp on my leg," she said.
Even though she didn't see it, she knew: It was a shark.
Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources spokesman Dan Dennison would later reportedly say it was likely a 5-foot black tip reef shark. Kim thinks it was closer to 8 feet long.
She started shouting, and her husband jumped into action to help.
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"As soon as I heard her, I turned to see what was going on, and I caught her just as she was flipping into the water," the victim's husband said. "I saw it right next to her, behind her. She couldn't see it was behind her, but I could see the two fins. It was big."
He estimates the fins were 12 inches out of the shallow surface of the water.
Kim said after a neighbor retrieved his wife's kayak, he noticed bite marks on the side. He thinks the shark attacked the kayak first, rather than just bumped into it.
Kim said his wife was coherent the whole time, so at first he thought she was brushed by the shark. But Kimberly knew better.
"It was a big animal," Kimberly said.
The diameter of the bite is about a foot long, by measuring the jagged scars on her leg.
Kimberly said she didn't immediately feel pain, and wasn't bleeding profusely.
She said while she doesn't remember a lot, she does remember people carrying her in the kayak, and them telling her she was being airlifted to the hospital.
"And I remember my husband saying, 'You finally get your helicopter ride,'" she said with a laugh.
She also asked her rescuers if she could at least sit up to look out the window of the helicopter, to which they replied "no."
Her husband Kim had previously said no to a helicopter tour of the Big Island because helicopters make him nervous.
She was taken into emergency surgery with a doctor who was treating her as his sixth shark attack patient overall. She was also put on IV for a few days to ensure there was no infection.
Remarkably, she said she felt no pain, and didn't even take a Tylenol after anesthesia wore off.
She thanked those who came to her rescue after she recovered.
"I don't think it intended to hurt me. I don't think it was trying to eat me. I think it thought I was something else," Kimberly said.
She also said she doesn't think odds are it will happen again.
She said the trauma of the bite was nowhere near as horrifying and life-altering as her experience at the Route 91 festival, where a gunman opened fire from a tower suite at the Mandalay Bay on a crowd of 22,000 below, killing 58 people.
"This experience of the shark bite thing, I mean it was an interesting story... but it's not nearly the same kind of trauma as Route 91. I was at Route 91. Thankfully, my daughter, my friend and I were not injured. But I shout out to the Route 91 family, because some of them are still going through some real trauma," she said.
