Leah Stewart has revealed her skin graft failed three and a half months after losing her arm in a shark attack.
The 34-year-old Sydney mother, who was mauled while swimming between the flags at Coogee Beach on June 13, shared the devastating update in an Instagram post on Tuesday morning. Stewart had gone for a routine check on the graft and returned with news she never wanted to deliver.
“Unfortunately this is not the post I was wanting to do but I had my graft checked yesterday and it was confirmed that it failed,” she wrote on Instagram. “So, I am feeling pretty devastated had quite a few tears and now we’re not really sure where to go from here.”
Stewart’s leg remains unhealed after more than three months of recovery. “It’s been three and a half months and my leg is still open,” she said in her video. The failed graft marks her second attempt at the procedure.
A small consolation came with the setback. Stewart noted she gets a temporary reprieve from the Vacuum-Assisted Closure machine that had been securing the graft in place. “I guess the only good thing is we’re trying something different, so I’m having a little break from the vac machine which means I can move a little bit more freely,” she wrote.
The VAC device uses suction to pull wounds together and remove fluid during healing. Stewart had been relying on it continuously since her hospitalization.
In her Instagram video, Stewart showed her injuries publicly for the first time. “I guess a lot of you wouldn’t know what a skin graft looks like so I’ll actually show you,” she said, stepping back from the camera. “I haven’t shown my legs yet so I’m a little nervous about this.”
She pointed to her right thigh where surgeons had harvested skin tissue. “Here is where they took the skin from my right leg,” she explained. “It’s still pretty raw but thankfully it’s healing. And they put it on my left leg but unfortunately it didn’t work.”
The Coogee Beach attack left Stewart in an induced coma for 10 days and required multiple surgeries, including the amputation of her left arm below the elbow. Her survival depended on a chain of rescuers: a world champion paddleboarder who brought her to shore, a trauma-specialist doctor who happened to be having coffee nearby, and patrolling Life Savers and uniformed police.
Earlier this month, Stewart detailed her fight for life on Australia’s ’60 Minutes,’ recounting the moment she came face-to-face with the shark before it severed her arm. “In my head, I was like, ‘You ugly f–ker, you are not taking me away from my daughter,'” she told the program. “I twisted myself around and I just started punching it over and over and over again … I think I must have got a really good one in. And so it let me go.”
The interview drew backlash from some corners, including former AFL player and radio host Brendan Fevola, who publicly questioned Stewart’s account. “She’s missing a limb, like her forearm is gone … if a shark was attacking you, you wouldn’t have much time to think I wouldn’t have thought,” Fevola said on radio. “I was on the couch with my wife Alex and my kids going, ‘She’s lying. Too much time to think. You’re not thinking all that, are you?'”
Shark expert Joel Nancarrow, known to social media followers as Hunter Shark Jaw Restoration, fired back at the online criticism in a lengthy statement on September 5. “The amount of judging and accusations of exaggerating while she was literally being eaten alive is beyond comprehension,” he wrote. “She’s being abused for calling the shark a monster while she was in its mouth. She’s quite entitled to call it whatever she wants in this situation.”
Nancarrow continued by addressing the common refrain that the ocean is the shark’s domain. “Just because people are living life and not hiding behind their screens scared of everything in the big wide (world) doesn’t mean this stuff doesn’t suck, people die in car accidents all the time, cars are on the road, it’s still tragic,” he added. “If a shark attack where a woman almost lost her life and a child her mother, makes you deep think into how you can belittle her in an online comment section as your first thought, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.”
Stewart has not indicated when her next graft attempt might occur or what alternative treatment her medical team is now pursuing.