A Tennessee mother was rushed into emergency surgery after she was injured in a freak accident while swimming with dolphins in Jamaica.
While on a lavish spring break vacation with her family, 28-year-old Cierra Stockard was swimming with dolphins when she slipped and accidentally landed on the animal’s dorsal fin.
The impact, described by her sister Neveah Garton as a ‘blunt force trauma’, was so strong that Stockard was sent to nearby Hospiten Hospital before being transferred to Cornwall Hospital in Montego Bay for emergency surgery.
‘She was swimming with the dolphins and as the dolphins lifted her in the air, Cierra slipped and the dolphin’s dorsal fin hit her crotch area,’ Garton wrote on a GoFundMe page organized for the injured Arrington-native.
‘This created such a blunt force trauma to the area it caused her to have a hematoma the size of three apples,’ Garton wrote.
Recounting the traumatic event from the hospital, Stockard said the ocean collision ‘felt like a car accident.’
‘It just felt like I got into a car accident,’ she told WKRN. ‘The force of it – It felt like boom! Something just happened really bad. I was just in so much pain. Tears were just running down my face.’
Stockard, who has sickle cell disease, had to undergo two blood transfusions in addition to the emergency surgery following the incident.
As of Wednesday, she was out of her second surgery, however, Garton said her sister ‘can’t manage it all by herself’ and is desperately asking for help in her return home.
The worry-stricken family is now trying to raise $55,000 to get their loved one back to the US.
‘We need her home because this is just not a good circumstance,’ Stockard’s aunt, Kimberley Watkins, told WRKN.
‘We’ve tried to contact the embassy,’ Watkins added. ‘Basically, they can just direct us. I’m not going to say they’ve not been a help, but we’ve been doing things ourselves.’
As of Saturday, the fundraising page has since raised $19,607 toward its goal.
In a Facebook update on Thursday, Stockard wrote that she was ‘fresh out of surgery’ and thanked loved ones for their ‘prayers and support.’
‘I just got back to the ward and got those clots removed and some blood in my body. Thank GOD! I am still needing 2 more units but one bag is better than NONE still no pain medications, so I’m literally thugging this pain out with a smile on my face,’ she wrote.
‘[Two] surgeries with no pain meds… make sure yall tell my kids their momma is a gangsta I hope this is one step closer to getting my butt back to Tennessee.’
The bizarre dolphin accident comes just after a young surfer collided with a pod of dolphins that threw him off his surfboard leaving him seriously injured and unconscious.
Eli Anderson, 20, was surfing his local break at Emerald Beach on the NSW mid north coast in Austrailia on December 29 when he suddenly felt ‘like he was hit by a car’, eerily similar to the experience Stockard relayed.
The carpenter was thrown from his surfboard and then caught up in a frantic frenzy of up to 20 dolphins blindly hunting for food.
Anderson was knocked out cold and suffered a fractured pelvis in the terrifying incident, and he says he is still struggling to deal with the trauma.
‘They came from nowhere and one of their fins sliced my board,’ Anderson told Daily Mail .
‘I was knocked off and then knocked out so I don’t remember much until I was washed up on to the beach.
‘As I came around, I started to count my limbs and checked for blood. I was in a lot of pain but also so confused, because I thought it must have been a shark attack.’
Anderson was surfing with his dad at the beach about north of Coffs Harbour and said they’re always wary of sharks in the water – but not dolphins.