The sharks at her insurance company will not give her a new arm.
A Virginia mother-of-three who lost the majority of her left arm in a shark attack in June 2024 recently discovered that her health insurer, Cigna Healthcare, refused to pay for a $73,000 myoelectric prosthetic hand she was promised in October would arrive on Christmas Eve.
“I just felt so deflated, I don’t know how else to describe it,” Elisabeth Foley, 51, told The Post about Cigna’s decision to deny her claim for the high-tech replacement arm; Foley’s specific plan did not cover advanced prosthetics costs.
“This was certainly one of the lowest points of my entire experience,” the former Starbucks barista admitted.
“It’s insane and frustrating because I’ve paid for health insurance my entire life and have always been in good health, so I’ve rarely used it. But I need their help right now, and they are refusing to help me.”
Last June, while on a beach vacation in Watersound, Florida, Foley said she was chest-deep in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico with her children when she spotted the shark.
“It looked like a torpedo in the water,” Foley explained. “It was huge.”
Foley turned and began swimming toward the shore when she was bit “between the legs,” resulting in pelvic damage.
Fearing that the shark would attack her children next, Foley said she “punched at it with [her] left hand, because I had read they’ll go away if you hit them in the nose.”
“It grabbed my hand and pulled me underwater. I thought I would die. I begged God, ‘Please, let me live.'”
She resurfaced and looked at her arm.
“It was gone,” she explained, adding that she could see “four inches of white bone.”
Her husband grabbed her and began pulling her to the shore. Fortunately for her, several medical professionals who were also on vacation at the beach came to her aid.
“I remember seeing a group of people in bathing suits, working on me,” she told me. A tourniquet was applied to her amputated arm. They also treated her left buttock, which had been shredded by the attack.
“If they hadn’t been there, I would have bled out, because it took 20 minutes for EMS to arrive,” Foley said, noting that they had to cross a series of boardwalks just to get to the remote beach.
She has since undergone 25 surgeries and still has a few to go.
While she currently uses a makeshift, body-powered prosthetic hook, Foley believes the myoelectric prosthetic hand — an artificial limb controlled by electrical signals generated by muscles — would be life-changing and provide her with true independence.
“We don’t think about how often we use our hands to do tasks until you lose one,” according to Foley.
A GoFundMe campaign has been started to help Foley fund the bionic arm.
According to a Cigna Healthcare spokesperson, “While many of our health plans cover a number of prosthetic options, we are evaluating benefit updates to help expand coverage of advanced prosthetics for more people.”
