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A bloke busting for a wee after a night on the beers had his arm ripped off by an alligator – and has been remarkably chilled out about it ever since.
The reaction from Jordan Rivera, 23, however, isn’t as you might expect following his first interview from his hospital bed.
Chaotic scenes erupted next to a pond around the back of Banditos Bar on South McCall Road in Port Charlotte, Florida, with Rivera understood to have popped out to do a wee at closing time on Sunday, May 21.
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Footage has been widely circulating online of a man, Rivera, sitting in the shallows slapping the water with a single arm.
Men, including a military veteran Trent Rozier, then try and drag him from the water as he is gripped with shock.
One bloke – with a cigarette dangling from his mouth – tries to stem the blood flow, saying “it's your… artery, I have to stop the bleeding,” before forming a tight grip around his stump with both hands causing Rivera to scream in agony.
The horrific footage shows Rivera’s arm with the flesh pulled off, the bright white bone clear to see in the light of a mobile phone torch.
The gruesome work is understood to have been carried out by an almost 11-foot alligator after he fell into the water.
Now though, from his hospital bed, Rivera has spoken toNBC2to offer a surprising take 36 hours later.
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“Those gators, I didn’t truly understand them until I woke up in the hospital and, ‘Oh, gator got your arm,” he said.
“I didn’t lose my life, I lost an arm, it’s not the end of the world, you know”.
“They got my elbow. So, I don’t have an elbow,” he added. “I can still move my arm around and whatnot.”
“So I ended up walking over to the water hole, I didn’t realise how big it was at the time, as I was going over there something happened where I either tripped or the ground below me just went down.
“I ended up in the water. And that’s literally the last thing I remember.”
His upbeat take is clearly wearing off and his mother Teresa is singing from the same hymn sheet.
“That’s the best thing, is that I have him. Yes, arm gone, very traumatic. But he’s here,” she said.
At the time of writing, Rivera still needs to have a procedure carried out to fully clean the wound of bacteria from the bite of the notoriously dirty beasts.
The alligator was destroyed following the attack and a GoFundMe has been set up for Jordan and his family.
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