How A Shark Attack Ended Up Saving This Mans Life

#1 Family Vacation At Huntington Beach

The waves were huge on a summer day at Huntington Beach, California, when Eugene Finney and his family basked in the sun. They had been there all week on a vacation and were planning to return back to Massachusetts in a few days. Eugene was playing in the waves with his 10 year old daughter, Temple, showing her how to dive into them. They waited for a big wave to come and Eugene lifted his daughter into the wave crest.

#2 The Shark Attacked

Something hit Finney in the back, harder then he had ever been hit in his life. Grabbing his daughter and pulling her to shallow water, she asked why he was bleeding, and that's when everyone saw the large gash from his right shoulder to the middle of his back.

"I would say it's like being hit by a ton of bricks, or like whiplash from a car, but it's not that," Finney said. "I've never been hit like that before."

#3 The Shark Bite Marks

Breathless and in searing pain, he kicked back to the surface and slowly made his way toward shore. Only once they'd reached shallow water and stood up to walk the rest of the way, did his daughter point out, "Dad, you're bleeding."

The hit whatever it was had opened up a thin gash along his upper back. Clutching a towel to his wound, he and Temple went to the showers to clean off.

It was then that beach goers had claimed to see two sharks circling out in the waters.

#4 He Continued His Family Vacation

Not wanting to cut his family vacation short, and with others at the beach telling him he was okay and looked fine, Finney stuck it out until he returned home and went to work the next Monday.

#5 He Began To Get Sick Upon Returning To Work

His boss told him he looked very sick and made him go to the emergency room. There he complained only of chest and back pains. They found inflammation around his heart and bruising in his thoracic cavity, all from the blunt force of the shark.

#6 The Worst News

However, that wasn't the worst of it. "After they finished telling me the diagnosis, I thought, ‘well, that's that,'" Finney recalled. "But then they started talking about the CAT scan. They referred to it as an ‘incidental find.' It was a tumor on my right kidney about the size of a walnut. They said, ‘I'm really sorry to tell you this, but you most likely have cancer.'"

#7 The Surgery

The only other way he would have found out that he had a tumor was when he had the symptoms of stage 4 cancer.

"I would have started losing weight and getting sick and at that point it would have been too late," he said.

Since the tumor was removed, Finney is cancer free and doesn't need radiation or chemotherapy.

#8 One Lucky Man

"If this didn't happen with the shark, causing me to go in with this chest pain, I would have never known about this cancer," he said. "I feel fortunate. I really feel like I've gotten a second chance at life and I'm not going to blow it."

Finney added, "If I could find this shark and give it a hug, I would." The attack about saved the lucky man's life. That and the doctors. Mostly the shark.

#9 He And His Family Are Not Planning Another Ocean Vacation Soon

Eugene Finney is one of the only men in the history of the world to be able to say that being bitten by a shark saved his life. Doctors are still unclear as to whether the injury was in fact the result of a shark bite, but one thing is very clear.. Finney is one lucky man.