In the heat of the moment, he kept his cool.
A Florida teen bushed off an alligator attack on a 911 call earlier this week, calmly telling dispatchers, “I’m good.”
“I just got bit by a gator,” Gabriel Klimis, 13, said on the Tuesday night emergency call, according to News 6.
“I’m OK though. I can walk and I can stand. I’m fine, it just stings a little, but I’m good,” he told the operator.
Klimis was cooling off in shallow water at Howell Creek Trestle in Winter Springs when the creature grabbed him, he later explained to WESH 2.
“I was going to get up, and the gator just started pulling me back under and just jumped up and grabbed me,” he recalled.
“I was just like hitting it in the head, and then it let go, and I ran up on the sand.”
Klimis’ friends helped him call 911, and he was rushed to the Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children with a wound that stretched from above his hip down his thigh.
“We were thinking the worst initially,” Klimis’ mother, Dr. Allison Klimis, told WESH 2 of the terrifying call she got from paramedics.
“[They said] ‘We’re going straight to Arnold Palmer with your son.’ I said, ‘oh, Arnold Palmer. Is it that bad?’ She said, ‘do you want to see it?’ I took one glance and said, ‘to Arnold Palmer right away. Let’s go.’”
Klimis’ 10-year-old brother, Jonah, witnessed the surprise attack.
“My first thought is, ‘you’re gonna die,’ because I’d never seen a gator bite happen in person,” he said of the incident.
Just a few hours later, however, Klimis was pictured sitting upright and looking happy at the hospital.
He got several stitches and now has a bandage covering the wound to prevent infection.
“The pain is just kind of like coming back a little bit more, because I don’t have the pain meds or anything, but it’s not too bad,” he told WESH 2.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission caught at 8-foot gator near the spot where Klimis was bitten on Wednesday, the outlet said.
Officials are continuing to monitor the creek, and Klimis will get his stitches out in a few weeks.