Finney said he had huge pain in his upper body after coming back to Massachusetts days after the incident.
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But amid their testing, doctors found something else: a walnut-size tumor in his kidney that indicated Stage 1 cancer. He said, “I’d never been hit like that before”.
Eugene Finney was on a family holiday with his two children, aged 6 and 10, and his girlfriend on Huntington Beach, California, when he went for a swim and felt something “slam into his back”.
That’s not the case for Eugene Finney, a Massachusetts man, who was on vacation in California in July, and credits his run-in with a shark for saving his life.
“I think this incident saved my life”, Finney said. After a few minutes, he was struck something that jarred him so much it gave him “instant whiplash.” It was pretty jarring.
Finney said when he got home the pain only got worse. He went to hospital where doctors determined he had interior bruising caused by blunt-force trauma. They told him it was genetic, and Finney inferred that he likely inherited the condition from his maternal grandmother, who died of stomach cancer.
Later when he came out of water, his daughter noticed his back was covered in blood.
He said: “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”.
Two weeks ago, Dr. Ingolf Tuerk used a minimally invasive robotic surgery to remove the tumour from Finney’s kidney. He is expected to make a full recovery and will not require radiation or chemotherapy treatments.
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“The shark was a real message to me”, Finney tells CBS Boston. “I feel fortunate. I really feel like I’ve gotten a second chance at life and I’m not going to blow it”, he told CBS Boston.
