Virginia mom who lost arm in shark attack learns insurance won’t cover $73K prosthetic hand: ‘They won’t help me’

The sharks at her insurance company won’t give her a new arm.

A Virginia mother-of-three who lost most of her left arm in a June 2024 shark attack recently learned her health insurer, Cigna Healthcare, refused to pay for a $73,000 myoelectric prosthetic hand she’d been told in October she would receive Christmas Eve.

“I just felt so deflated, I don’t know how else to describe it,” Elisabeth Foley, 51, told The Post, reflecting on Cigna’s decision to deny her claim for the high-tech replacement arm; Foley’s particular plan did not cover advanced prosthetics costs.

“This was certainly one of the lowest points of this entire experience I’ve had,” the former Starbucks barista said. “It’s insane and so frustrating, because I paid for health insurance my entire life, and had the healthiest life, so I barely used it. But I need their help now, and they won’t help me.”

Last June, while on a beach vacation to Watersound, FL., Foley said she was chest-deep in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, having fun with her kids, when she spotted the shark.

“It looked like a torpedo in the water,” Foley recalled. “It was huge.”

Foley turned and started swimming for the shore when she was bit “between the legs,” sustaining pelvic damage.

Fearing the shark would go after her kids 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 me by the hand and pulled me underwater. I thought I was going to die. I called out to God, ‘Please, let me live.'”

Suddenly, she resurfaced, and looked at her arm.

“It was gone,” she said, adding she could see “four inches of white bone.”

Her husband grabbed her and started pulling her to shore. Lucky for her, several medical professionals, also at the beach on vacation, rushed to her aid.

“I remember seeing a group of people in bathing suits, working on me,” she said. A tourniquet was placed on her amputated arm. They also treated her left buttock, which was shredded from the attack.

“If they hadn’t been there, I certainly would have bled out, because it took 20 minutes for EMS to get there,” Foley said, noting they had to navigate a string of boardwalks just to get to the isolated beach.

She’s since endured 25 surgeries, and still has a handful to go.

While she already uses a make-do, body-powered prosthetic hook, Foley said the myoelectric prosthetic hand — an artificial limb controlled through the electrical signals generated by muscles — would be life-changing, and could provide her with true independence.

“We don’t think about how often we use our hands to do tasks until you lose one,” said Foley.

A GoFundMe campaign has been launched to help Foley fund the bionic arm.

In a statement, a Cigna Healthcare spokesperson said, “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.”