I just had to get me and Sam out of the water

Thursday Island is a small island at the very top of Australia, and on a Saturday afternoon last October Sam Nai, who was 14, was fishing and swimming off the wharf with his friends when, at about twenty past six, a shark bit him across the stomach. He swam the 20 metres back to the shore with the water going red around him and told his friends that a shark had got him.

His friend Titus was 11, and he could see the shark still going round in the water, and he jumped in anyway and pulled Sam out.

The shark could've bitten me too when it came back. I just had to get me and Sam out of the water.Titus Joseph, to 7NEWS

His other friend, Yenick, who was 14, ran to Sam's house to get Sam's mum, Shanna, who rang the ambulance and ran to the wharf, and when she got there Sam looked up at her and said, "I'm in pain, and you run really fast," and she told him, "For you, my boy, I'd grow wings." The bite was very deep, so Sam's cousin took off his own shirt and they pressed it on the wound to hold Sam together until the ambulance came.

The hospital

A helicopter flew Sam to the big hospital in Townsville, with his mum sitting beside him counting the bags of blood they gave him on the way, which came to six. The doctor, Brendan O'Connor, said the bite was one of the worst he had ever seen, because it had taken away the wall of Sam's stomach and stopped about a millimetre short of his insides, and one millimetre more would have killed him.

Sam had more than 20 operations over four months, starting with the doctors cleaning out all the sand and then building him a new stomach wall, and because Sam is still growing they used a special sheet that his own skin could grow through, so that it would grow with him. The doctor thinks nobody has ever lived through a shark bite like that before, and Sam asked him to sing while he was being put to sleep for the operations, which the doctor, who is Irish, did.

Home

After a month Sam could walk again, and in June, seven months after the bite, he went home to Thursday Island, where two days later he was back at his dance group, Island Stars, learning the old dances of the islands with the other boys. His mum says he has always been her little dancer and that the shark has not made him scared, and he is 15 now, back at school and back in the water.

This week the Queensland Ambulance Service gave Titus and Yenick its Young Heroes of the Year award, and one of the ambulance crew from that evening said it plainly: without those two boys, Sam would not be alive.