A 15-year-old boy is lucky to be alive today after he fought off a shark attack on Monday just off the coast of Surfside Beach in Texas. The attack was a very odd phenomenon for an area that hasn't seen one in quite some time.

The attack occurred around 2:45 p.m. on a section of beach a few miles north of the town of Surfside, which is roughly an hour from Houston. A boy was wading in the water with his church group and was about waist deep when he was attacked by a four-foot shark. He was bitten twice, but was able to fend off the shark before it could do any more damage.

"I hope this teenager grows up to be a cop and gets my back," EMT Zuandra Monnat told ABC's affiliate KTRK. "He fought off this shark. It bit his leg and he literally tore this shark off of him and that's how he got the lacerations to his hands."

The boy, who remains unnamed, was originally bitten on the leg, and then proceeded to hit the shark on the head. The shark then proceeded to bite him on the hand but soon retreated as the boy's friends came over to assist him.

"Initially, I saw a boy who was brought onto the beach," Monnat continued. "As far as his injury goes, he was bitten on the leg. He had multiple lacerations on his hand. We bandaged that up using a multi-trauma, which is basically a very big, large band-aid and we got him over to Life Flight as quick as we could."

The victim was air lifted away from the beach and was transported to Memorial Hermann Hospital with injuries that his doctors describe as being non-fatal. There was some worry that he might have sustained serious injuries to his hands, but it appears that he will be able to make a full recovery.

"Anything that you have that you actually use on a day-to-day basis, being your hands or your head or anything like that, it's more of a quality-of-life situation," Monnat said. "We want him to be able to have all the mobility of his hands and not lose with his hands. Everything was connected, it was just more of wanting to make sure everything continued to work properly."

The shark bite is especially shocking because of the area in which it occurred. The Texas Gulf Coast is generally considered to be safe from the risk of shark bites. Authorities claim that there have been only 37 shark attacks since 1911 along the entire coast. In Surfside, the police chief there claims this incident was the first shark bite in over 25 years.

"I never worry about that in Texas," 17-year-old Taylor Cervantes told the Fox station KRIV. "I don't know. You don't hear about it often, but it's really scary."