A British yoga instructor said she is lucky to be alive after she was sliced open by a boat propeller while snorkeling in Mexico during a dream vacation with her husband.
Amor Armitage, 37, said it is a “miracle” she survived the horrific accident on Dec. 17 while swimming in the azure waters off Cozumel, the exotic island renowned for its world-class diving.
Armitage described the nightmarish ordeal on her website, yogabasingstoke.com.
She said it all started when she was snorkeling and free diving while her hubby, Chase, a movie stuntman who had been working on a US flick.
The yoga instructor said she decided to return to the boat and was about to climb the ladder when the boat’s engine roared to life.
“When I hold onto the ladder, I take out one fin, the captain of the boat doesn’t see me, I suddenly realise the boat has started moving and I’m unable to say anything, words just didn’t come out as fear freezed [sic] me,” Armitage wrote.
“Everything seems to slow down as I feel the boat’s propeller hitting my abdomen, genitals and legs, my body feels heavy and I see the boat moving away from me, out of my gut comes a visceral scream, asking for help, the captain sees me but I know I have to swim towards the boat, so with cuts all over my body I managed to swim to the ladder once again,” she continued.
Armitage said the captain told her she needed to “go up the ladder,” but she “looked down and see my insides out.”
“God must have been holding me (through the surge of stress hormones) that helped me push myself up to the boat while my leg feels broken, my body feels mutilated and I feel a pain that is out of this world,” she described.
Armitage eventually made it back onto the boat, where she said her husband’s words and love kept her alive on the journey to the hospital.
“He did his best to keep me with him and I truly feel that if it wasn’t for my angel Chase, I would not be here today,” she added.
But it was a blood clot which was the true miracle.
“It seems that during the accident, I got a blood clot in my femoral artery which prevented me from losing too much blood both during transport to the hospital, and during surgery,” Armitage revealed.
“Without it, I would have lost a lot of blood,” Armitage said.
The yoga instructor said she was also lucky that the propeller didn’t reach any of her organs — and that she had an “extra artery.”
The extra blood vessel “allowed blood to circulate to the whole leg and foot,” she said, adding that “not everyone has this artery, so doctors were really happy and so am I.”
Armitage has undergone three surgeries and 10 blood transfusions after the horrifying accident.
She described part of her inner thigh as “completely scrambled” and her quads, tendons and tibial bone as “sliced.”
On Dec. 29, she gave an update in which she was still on antibiotics, painkillers and “a whole lot of medication.”
She wrote that she has “cried lots and smiled too.”
“I am at peace, I accept what happened fully and know that the Universe has a divine plan for me through this,” she said.
Armitage said she should be ready to return to the UK early this month, but that the “road to recovery will be slow” and the “hospital bills are huge.”
She added that the couple did not have insurance during the ill-fated trip.
A Just Giving page has raised more than £52,000 — about $62,000 — so far.
