They say that when you have a dog in your life, they become a part of you. You will start to treat them like family. That is true in the case of 74-year-old Suzan Marciano. She and her golden retriever mix “Nalu” lives in Boca Raton, Florida.

Suzan and her dog were out for a stroll in a nearby Burt Aaronson Park at around 6:30 in the afternoon of August 24th when what was supposed to be a lovely stroll turned into a nightmare.

You see, the lake at the park is often used for water skiing. The clear, shallow water looked inviting. Suzan unclipped Nalu’s leash and they started a game of fetch. She would toss a stick into the water and the pooch excitedly retrieves it and bring it back to her. But when she got closer to the water’s edge, she caught a glimpse of something in the water – a moving dark shadow.

In an interview with The Palm Beach Post, Suzan said, “My heart dropped.”

The shadow belonged to a 6-foot-alligator!

The huge reptile lunged and quickly bit down on Nalu. Then out of parental instinct, Suzan quickly moved towards her struggling dog. She said, “I wasn’t thinking. I did the only thing I could do. I came down on the alligator with all my weight.”

Then the alligator released Nalu but it turned its attention on Suzan, biting her hand instead. Thankfully, that’s all she got from this scary encounter.

She said, “Providence must have been with me. It was all one big blur. I was in such shock. I didn’t feel any pain.”

Suzan was hesitant about getting medical attention but a friend was able to convince her to go get her hand checked. It had a puncture wound in the palm area and she ended up with five stitches. She said, “I almost didn’t go. All I could think was, ‘I want to get home.’ I was in such a terrible state that I wasn’t thinking straight. When I called her, she told me, ‘You have to do something. You need a tetanus shot and you need the injury looked at.’ That snapped me back to reality.”

Suzan got out of that situation with just a couple of stitches, but not Nalu. The pooch required much more extensive care, including surgery and stitches in her abdomen and thigh. Suzan shared, “I had this feeling that she was going to survive. If she survived that, she can survive the surgery.”

Since the incident, Suzan and Nalu had avoided the park. The trauma that they got out of that scary situation made them scared of the lake. It took a few weeks before they finally had the courage to go back. She said, “I hardly went anywhere for two weeks afterward. I was in such a traumatic state. Every couple of hours, I was breaking into tears for no apparent reason. I was still seeing the shadow with two eyes looking up from out of the water. That image kept coming back to me.”

An incident report stated that both a park ranger and a Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission officer returned to the park, but found no sign of an alligator in the lake.