San Francisco – The Humboldt County man who was attacked by a mountain lion is showing signs of improvement and was upgraded to stable condition Tuesday, doctors said.
Surgeons at California Pacific Medical Center said Jim Hamm, 70, was sitting up and talking and that the antibiotics he was given seemed to be helping.
Hamm was transported to the San Francisco hospital in a medical plane Sunday night after he took a turn for the worse at an Arcata facility. He first underwent surgery Wednesday after a female mountain lion attacked him while he and his wife were hiking in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, about 50 miles north of Eureka.
At a news conference Tuesday, Dr. Rudy Buntic said an upcoming procedure would take muscle tissue from one area of Hamm’s body and move it to his head, where his most severe injuries were. Then Hamm would have skin grafted on top of that.
Hamm’s wife, Nell, 65, smashed the cat in the snout with a large branch and stabbed it with a pen to fend off the attack.
“At one point I was crying and screaming and I said, ‘Honey, it’s not working. It’s not working, and I don’t know what to do,”‘ she recalled Tuesday. “And he said, ‘There’s a pen in my pocket.
Get the pen and poke it in the eye.”‘ The animal then fled.
Game wardens later closed the park and shot and killed a pair of lions. Researchers identified one of them as the attacker.
