“I should’ve bled to death right there. I should’ve least drowned on my blood,” Lee Brooke told a community gathering as reported by KDVR-TV.
Brooke and three other men went hunting in western Wyoming in 2016. He shot an elk and returned the next day to pack out the meat when he saw it was covered with debris. Feeling the adrenaline rush he immediately turned to leave but a grizzly bear attacked him from behind. Brooke used his knife to try to defend himself as the bear tore into him. After several strikes, it finally left but not before tearing off part of his face.
Brooke prayed for help. An hour later he was reunited with his friends who picked up his nose, mustache and upper lip from off the ground.
A helicopter flew him to the hospital where doctors placed him in a medically induced coma for one month. They used his other body parts to reconstruct what they could of his face. More surgeries are expected in his future.
Brooke calls his survival “divine intervention.”