‘It did look pretty scary’: Surgeons recount treating shark bite victim

By Rachael Perry

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    WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (WPBF) — The doctors who treated a surfer after he was bit by a shark are recounting how the treatment and surgery played out.

Cole Taschman, a surfer in Stuart, was bit by a shark Friday while surfing near Bathtub Beach. In an interview with WPBF, Taschman said the shark had both his feet in its mouth before Taschman was able to catch a wave and get away from it.

Taschman was taken to a hospital in Martin County before being transferred to St. Mary’s Medical Clinic in West Palm Beach.

Sitting aside his girlfriend and two of the doctors who treated him, Taschman shared more about that day.

“The shark came up behind me, bit me, both feet were in the shark’s mouth at once, and it was probably about an eight or nine-foot bull or tiger shark,” he said. “Lucky enough, there was a set of waves right there, so as he bit me, I looked back and I kind of got a glimpse of him, very wide nose and I screamed, I was like, I’m bit.”

He said before the bite happened, he was surfing with some of his friends in honor of a friend who had died following some mental health struggles.

“That’s why we’re all out there that day,” he said.

One of his friends was able to take the leashes from the surfboards and create tourniquets to stop the bleeding while they drove to the hospital.

Once he was transferred from Martin County to St. Mary’s Medical Center, Dr. Ibrahim Jabbour, a trauma surgeon, began treating Taschman.

“The injury from the shark was very impressive. Like the lacerations from the shark teeth are almost as clean as from the knives, the surgical steel we used to do our surgeries,” Jabbour said.

Jabbour works with a team of doctors led by trauma medical director Dr. Robert Borrego.

“The problems we encountered were soft tissue injuries to the skin and the tissues underneath, bleeding from multiple vessels and potential injury to the bone,” he said.

He said the main concern was infection.

“There’s some bacterial flora that are inherent to the different species of sharks, like from the mouth of the shark,” Jabbour said. “There’s some bacterial load within the waters, depending on what type of waters, and then a lot of the contamination and debris was just from sand and probably running.”

He said they had to wash out the wounds several times due to the large amounts of debris.

“It was very difficult and there was so much debris that you could see this debris on the X-rays that we took to look for bone injuries,” Jabbour said.

To avoid infection, Dr. Robert Borrego said based on the shark species, they use antibiotics to target bacteria known to be present with that specific species of shark.

In this case, after speaking with Taschman, they were able to identify that the bite had potentially come from a bull or tiger shark.

“They [first hospital] had given him some antibiotics, but they hadn’t given him one specific one that I knew he was at risk for based on where he was bit,” Borrego said. “When I first heard the story, I thought that it was a blacktip because of where he was, but when I spoke to Cole, and he told me that he got both feet at once and he saw the width of the head, then I agreed with him that it must have been a small tiger or a bull shark.”

Based on that, Borrego said they use the appropriate antibiotics to treat the wounds. He said they weren’t concerned about Cole losing a foot from the bite itself, but instead, they feared an infection.

Borrego also said his prior research on shark bites and the use of antibiotics.

“There was nothing in the literature to support it before I did the work of how to treat the patients preemptively and empirically with the best antibiotic possible for the best result,” he said.

Because of that, they sampled over 100 sharks without hurting them by using a technique that causes tonic immobility in sharks.

“You rub the snout, and they go tonic. And then we had an instrument about this long, so we didn’t get our hands too close, and then we swabbed into samples of the teeth and the jaw and the mouth,” he said.

They took their samples to the lab at St. Mary’s and analyzed them with their pharmacologists, microbiologists and infectious disease doctors.

“We made a whole log of all these sharks; the bacteria, where they were, what type of shark it was, how deep the water was, was that a surface feeder, a bottom feeder,” Borrego said.

From there, they made a table based on that research to help identify what shark a bite came from since most victims aren’t able to.

“Then, based on all those factors, we prescribed the antibiotics,” Borrego said.

He said the study took over two years to complete.

“I probably could do more because obviously, I couldn’t catch every type of species of shark. So there’s still more work to be done,” he said.

As for Taschman, Borrego said they used where he was surfing, what type of shark they believe caused the bite and the contamination in the wound to prescribe the antibiotics.

“We used a broad spectrum antibiotic to treat the likely bacteria that were there and then we used another specific antibiotic for a bacteria that comes in marine environments that if you miss it, it could be deadly,” he said.

Borrego said their medical center sees between six and seven shark bite victims every year. Taschman marks their sixth in 2024. He said the majority of the bites are from reef sharks, blacktip sharks and bull sharks.

Taschman said he’s thankful to be in good hands and appreciates the team at St. Mary’s Medical Center for the care and kindness they’ve shown him.

He added that his friends and he would like to start training other people on surfing safety, including how to create tourniquets out of the materials you have available in the event of an emergency.

Taschman is expected to make a full recovery and said he will continue surfing in the future but plans to avoid the beach where the bite took place.

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