A 23-year-old Florida man is extremely lucky to be alive after a run-in with an alligator early Sunday morning that resulted in him losing an arm.
Jordan Rivera had been patronizing Banditos Bar in Port Charlotte, about 45 minutes north of Fort Myers, when he needed to use the bathroom. However, lines were long, so Rivera instead took it upon himself to wander around to the back of the bar in an attempt to urinate into a pond. But that's about the last thing he remembers—after somehow falling into the pond, Rivera woke up in the hospital missing an arm.
“Those gators, I didn’t truly understand them until I woke up in the hospital and, ‘Oh, gator got your arm,'" he told Southwest Florida's NBC 2 from his hospital bed in the Gulf Coast Medical Center's ICU. Rivera quite understandably describes his state of mind in the hospital as "confusion."
"I was like ‘Whoa’. Because I just woke up and I was just sitting here," he continued. "And I looked over and I saw my arm the way it was and I was like, ‘Whoa.' It kind of feels like my arm is just there, but not there.”
Perhaps it's fortunate that Rivera doesn't remember the gristly attack.
“I ended up walking over to the water hole, I didn’t realize how big it was at the time," he recalled. "As I was going over there something happened where I either tripped or the ground below me just went down. I ended up in the water."
After the gator attacked, biting off his arm just above the elbow, bystanders rushed to pull him out of the water and applied a tourniquet until help arrived. His mother, Teresa Lessa, is calling those who helped "angels" for saving her son's life.
"The chance of someone being there with a tourniquet, to me, it’s a miracle that he’s here," she told reporters.
But despite the traumatic circumstances surrounding the gator attack, Rivera has unusually optimistic outlook. “I didn’t lose my life. I lost an arm. It’s not the end of the world, you know," he added.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission later located and trapped the 10-and-a-half-foot gator that attacked Rivera and euthanized it—which is a typical outcome for gators that attack humans.
