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Photo: BEN MCRAE / Getty Images / iStockphoto
An 18-year-old British woman who was attacked by a crocodile in Zambia was lucky: She not only survived the attack, but her foot was also saved.
"When the incident happened, I had already accepted that I was going to lose my foot," said Amelie Osborn-Smith in a video that the Medland Hospital published from the hospital in the Zambian capital Lusaka.
It's okay, she'll lose her foot, but be alive, she told her friends.
She was then operated on in the hospital in the capital, several hundred kilometers away.
"Then I was told my foot would be fine and that I was going to walk again, which was a tremendous relief," Osborn-Smith said.
According to several media outlets, including Sky News, the crocodile had caught the 18-year-old last week when she hung her foot over the edge of a boat not far from the famous Victoria Falls.
The animal dragged the woman into the water of the Zambezi River.
Several people then jumped into the water, a friend had repeatedly hit the crocodile on the nose until the animal let go of Osborn-Smith.
When asked what she was thinking at the moment of the attack, the young woman said that she "wasn't really thinking".
"People say you watch your life go by in front of your eyes, but that's not true, you just think: 'How do I get out of this situation?'" Said the 18-year-old.
"The brain works at full speed trying to figure out how to survive, but I was just very, very lucky."
According to the reports, Osborn-Smith was vacationing in the South African country where her grandmother owned a property.
She is scheduled to return to the UK in the coming days.
bbr / dpa