Dolphins leave Tennessee mom hurt after spring break swim

A Tennessee mom with sickle cell anemia is trying to get back to the US after she was hurt in a freak accident while swimming with dolphins in Jamaica.Cierra Stockard was swimming with the gentle sea creatures during spring break when one of the animals lifted her into the air — and she fell, landing on the dolphin’s dorsal fin, she told Nashville’s WKRN.She was then brought to a local hospital in Montego Bay. “It just felt like I got into a car accident,” the mother of two said in a phone interview with WKRN from the hospital in Jamaica.

“The force of it — It felt like boom! Something just happened really bad.I was just in so much pain.

Tears were just running down my face.”The “blunt force trauma” left Stockard with a serious bruise, the size of “three apples,” her sister wrote on GoFundMe. Stockard, who remains in Jamaica with some family, underwent emergency surgery and two blood transfusions but is uncertain how and when she can go home.The family is trying to raise $55,000 to get her back to America.Stockard may need a third transfusion because of her disease and has been using “medication from home” to manage her sickle cell disease, but “can’t manage it all by herself,” her sister, Nevaeh Garton, wrote in the online fundraiser.

“We need her home because this is just not a good circumstance,” Stockard’s aunt, Kimberley Watkins, told WRKN.“We’ve tried to contact the embassy,” Watkins added.“Basically, they can just direct us.

I’m not going to say they’ve not been a help, but we’ve been doing things ourselves.”...