At 15, Lulu Gribbin was attacked by a shark, as she swam off of Florida’s Seacrest Beach, losing her left hand and leg.

Before her attack, Lulu Gribbin was, by all accounts, a very normal teenage girl.

She enjoyed spending time with her twin sister, Ellie, and could frequently be found in the gym practicing volleyball or traveling for games. She liked spending time with her mom on the weekends, was an acolyte at her church at home in Alabama and she had a close friend group, who enjoyed the kind of goofy teenager fun that is commonplace for girls of that age.

She was also very competitive, her mother tells PEOPLE exclusively, like her twin sister.

“Lulu was a typical teenage, hormonal girl. It’s highs and lows,” says Ann Blair Gribbin. “Mostly highs, um, but you know, just [a] normal teenager.”

It was just one of these normal teenage girl days spent with friends on the beach, on a normal mother-daughter trip, however, that changed everything.

One mother-daughter beach trip changed everything for the 15-year-old and her family

During a mother-daughter trip to Florida’s Seacrest Beach on the Gulf Coast, Lulu and her friends were swimming and diving for sand dollars when something occurred that, in an instant, would change her entire world.

“When we were headed in, we were just riding the waves and kind of body surfing,” Lulu, now 16, recalls.

Suddenly, her friend turned around and screamed, “Shark!”

The girls started swimming “for our lives, and not really thinking about what was happening,” Lulu remembers. “We were just all in shock at that point.”

Despite the chaos, Lulu recalls having the wherewithal to slow down as they made their way back to the beach, telling herself, “Oh my gosh, I need to calm down,” remembering something that she had learned about sharks typically going for frantic things in the water.

“So I calmed down and then I lifted my arm out of the water and I could see like the flesh on my arm,” she says. “And that’s when I realized… this was a very real situation.”

“I tried to call for help and no words came out,” she says. “And I just remember waking up on the shore with strangers surrounding me and just saving my life.”

Ann Blair had just finished lunch with the other moms on the trip and had paid the bill when she saw crowds gathering at the beach.

“My friend Ellen tried to call her two girls that were there with her,” Ann Blair explains. “And she’s like, ‘They are not picking up. Something is wrong.’ So we started running.”

“I ran past Lulu and looked down. I was running and then I noticed like, ‘Wait a second.’ It was Lulu. She was white as a ghost.”

“I turned back around and Ellie found me and was like, ‘Mom, it’s Lulu,” Ann Blair says.

“I just remember screaming, like I didn’t know what else to do. Ellie kind of calmed me down. It was like a scene out of a movie.”

The immediate aftermath of the shark attack left Lulu’s family scrambling for answers

Lulu Gribbin.Lulu Gribbin

At the time, reports from ABC News and WBRC shared that the two teenage girls were injured by a shark and transported to separate area hospitals.

One victim received “significant injuries to one upper and one lower extremity, both requiring the application of tourniquets,” South Walton Fire District Chief Ryan Crawford said, while the other victim received “flesh wounds” to her right foot.

Just over an hour earlier on the same day, a 45-year-old woman was also swimming near a sandbar at Watersound Beach when a shark bit her around her midsection, pelvis and left arm, according to a Walton County Sheriff’s Office press conference.

“I didn’t know that her hand was bitten off ’cause they had covered it up,” Ann Blair shares. “And then I could see her leg and like, that was probably the worst part ’cause her leg was gone basically. And it’s something that like, I can see it right now. I will never unsee it.”

As paramedics worked, Ellie held her sister’s eyes open while Ann Blair held her hand. It was hot on the beach, Lulu recalls, and she remembers feeling the relief of the air conditioning in the ambulance as it transported her to the hospital.

Ann Blair hopped in another car with Ellie and another mom friend and went back to the house they had rented to retrieve their purses. “We didn’t know if she was going to the hospital close to where we were. We really had no idea. So we just started driving until we figured out,” she says.

The pair endured an agonizing drive to the hospital, unsure of Lulu’s status — praying the entire way.

“All I said literally over and over was, ‘God, please let her breathe. Just please breathe,’” Ann Blair recounts.

Doctors made the call to amputate Lulu’s leg, saying that had they chosen to save it, they would have likely had to amputate within the year. From there, Lulu was transported to OrthoCarolina’s Reconstructive Center for Lost Limbs in Charlotte, N.C., where she spent 77 days getting more extensive surgeries and recovering.

Rehab posed a series of new challenges for Lulu

Lulu Gribbin.Lulu Gribbin

In rehab, Lulu had to start from scratch: relearning how to dress herself, brushing her teeth, using the bathroom, “basically everything that you don’t think about.”

Despite the obvious mental toll that an injury of Lulu’s nature might take on a person, her positive attitude never faltered.

“There were so many other patients that were in worse conditions than me and that didn’t even have the option to do half the stuff that I was doing,” she says. “They would do anything in the world to be in my position. So I was just grateful that I had the option to do what they were teaching.”

Her mother echoes her sentiments, “It was very eye-opening. Being on a rehab floor, you have people who’ve been in car wrecks, brain injuries, couldn’t walk at all, paralyzed.”

“You felt just grateful that Lulu had a brain and she is herself. She just doesn’t have an arm and a leg like that. I mean, but she is her same self.”

Lulu Gribbin.Lulu Gribbin

For the next three months, Ann Blair stayed in Charlotte with Lulu, sleeping in a chair while Joe, Lulu’s father, stayed with the couple’s other three children back in the Mountain Brook suburb of Birmingham, Ala.

“She never complained one time,” says Ann Blair, of watching her daughter manage the challenges thrown her way. “We never wanted this for our child and I would go back in a heartbeat, but the way she has handled it has been truly amazing.”

Relearning how to walk posed one of the more significant roadblocks for Lulu

One of the hardest parts, Lulu admits, was learning to trust her prosthetics.

“There’s a lot of mental blocks that I couldn’t trust it because it’s a piece of metal,” she explains. “So that was definitely a bump in the road, but I just continued to force myself to do it.”

A key factor in Lulu’s recovery and rehabilitation is that she was able to get prosthetics earlier than most patients, she and her mother explain.

“My situation is an anomaly,” she says. “Most people get prosthetics a very long time after they are amputated.”

Lulu Gribbin and her siblings.Lulu Gribbin

Ann Blair adds, “She walked out of the hospital, which is extremely unheard of.”

Running, which was another one of Lulu’s goals post-accident, posed another hardship. When she was first fitted for her blade, or running leg, Ann Blair recalls Lulu saying, “Mom, I’m gonna run out of here. Watch!”

“I busted it,” Lulu laughs, explaining how she fell over on her first attempt. Now, at physical therapy, Lulu says that she will often wear a harness as she runs on a treadmill, allowing her to be caught if she falls.

“I’m still figuring out the knee,” she admits. “Running on the knee, learning how to pick up speed, how to run without holding on.”

“It was a big goal just to — I am very competitive — to show people that it is possible,” she says.

Slowly, but surely, things returned to a new sense of normalcy for the teen

Lulu and her sister Ellie.Lulu Gribbin

When Lulu finally returned home to Alabama, she was met with an outpouring of support.

“The next day, they had a parade in our town,” Lulu says. “So when we got home from the hospital the next day, they had like a parade which had like 3,000 people in the streets. Everybody was wearing purple.”

“That was the first time when I realized just how involved the community was,” she thinks back to how a friend had told someone in their town that Lulu’s favorite color was purple. The small piece of information resulted in purple shirts being made and purple bows being added to mailboxes around town in her support.

In recovery, Lulu had received “buckets and buckets” of care packages and letters — from friends and from supporters across the country. “I finished reading them this year, that’s how many there were.”

When they returned home, the dining room table was covered in stacks and stacks of mail, gifts and well-wishes from those across the country who had heard Lulu’s story and wanted to help or show their kindness.

When she first returned home, Lulu moved into the family’s guest bedroom on the main floor in order to make things easier on her as she relearned how to go up and down the stairs on her new leg.

Despite missing some milestones, like her and her twin sister’s first day of high school, Lulu found ways to stay up to date and engaged with school in the face of her injury.

The school system worked with her to accommodate her needs, providing Lulu with an iPad so she could keep up with as much work as possible from her recovery bed.

And her siblings, for their part, never felt the need to treat Lulu any differently, both she and her mom laugh.

Lulu and Ellie Gribbin.Lulu Gribbin

“Everybody was upset at first,” Ann Blair says. “And then we all just turned to say, okay, she’s alive. It could be the other way. Like, she could not be here, and she is still herself.”

“And they do not treat her any differently,” she continues. “So if I had like bought Lulu something, they’re like, ‘Why does she get that?’ So they have not skipped a beat.”

In the year since her accident, Lulu has been able to relearn how to do all sorts of things, creating her own new milestones in the face of those she may have missed out on during recovery.

Before the accident, she was an avid athlete — playing everything from golf to going waterskiing. Now, as a result of prosthetics and practice, Lulu has been able to return to both golf and waterskiing.

She has a golf hand, ordered specially by the golf pro who teaches her in Alabama, and 3D printed to fit her needs.

Waterskiing, on the other hand, Lulu is able to do all on her own. Before the attack, Lulu was a skilled slalom skier, and after the attack, she was able to relearn how to ski without her leg and her other arm.

Like other teens her age, she can now drive, with the help of a knob and a left foot accelerator. And, what’s more, after getting to film a commercial for Buick, the car dealership gifted her gas gift cards.

“My dad is always like, ‘I’m gonna take away your gas money,’” she jokes. “And I’m like, ‘You don’t give me gas money!’”

Propelled by the success of her own recovery journey, Lulu and her family knew they wanted to do something with her story to help others

Lulu at Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour.Lulu Gribbin

As a result of all of the help and cutting-edge technology that Lulu was able to gain access to throughout her recovery, she and her family ultimately knew that they wanted to do something to be able to give back and expand care access for others with limb differences.

After gaining “a lot” of followers on Instagram in the wake of the accident, Lulu and her family decided to “do something good” with all of them.

“We decided to make the Lulu Strong Foundation since I have these people following me, and they would be able to help enhance amputees’ lives,” Lulu reveals.

During her recovery, Lulu was able to use virtual reality technology to enhance her experience, creating the illusion of another limb in order to combat the effects of phantom limb pain in her hand. However, she says, the technology for virtual reality relating to her leg did not exist.

“And so in talking with the doctors and trying to come up with ways to get funding, we were throwing around with Lulu’s point, like Instagram, maybe if we’d be like, ‘Hey, everybody on Instagram donate a dollar,’” Ann Blair explains.

Lulu Gribbin.Lulu Gribbin

After tossing around ideas, the family became more ambitious with their goals.

“We want to do more than just virtual reality. We want to raise money for the improvement of technology,” Ann Blair explains. “Really, the goal of the foundation outside of virtual reality is to raise funds for research, technology and innovation within the amputee space.”

Citing how positive and relatively quick Lulu’s experience getting prosthetics had been, Ann Blair says that they want the same for others experiencing limb loss and related disabilities.

“If you can speed up the process and the education and all of those things, like we want the experience for others to be like Lulu’s experience,” she says.

The foundation’s first goal is funding research into the virtual reality leg. Those looking to support the foundation can donate to the project’s first mission — raising $500,000 for virtual reality technologies.

Over the course of research and setting up the foundation, Lulu says she has been able to learn all kinds of new things that she hadn’t learned during the course of her treatment.

“Like there’s over like 300 different kinds of feet for me that I could, that I have the option to have,” she reveals — telling PEOPLE about the different feet available for different activities, including running feet, feet with slits in the toes and even a canoeing foot.

Lulu herself has three different legs and three different arms.

Beyond the foundation, Lulu also successfully advocated for the creation of a shark attack alert system in Alabama called Lulu’s Law, legislation that unanimously passed the U.S. Senate and is awaiting approval in the House.

“If I had known that there was another shark attack, I would not have been in the water,” she says.

Lulu also found strength to return to the ocean — and the beach where the attack happened

Lulu Gribbin.Lulu Gribbin

Lulu remembers one of the first times she returned to the ocean after the attack.

“The very first time I went back, it was really just one of the best feelings ever,” Lulu says. “It was like a sense of peace and calm. And it just felt really freeing to — even though I don’t love the ocean — be back.”

Her return to the water happened during a retreat hosted by Bethany Hamilton for girls with limb differences. Empathetic toward Lulu’s anxiety, the organizers let her enter the water last.

Months later, she made another trip — this time with friends — to the very spot where she was attacked.

“It wasn’t the first time I had gone back into the Gulf, but it was the first time I had been back to the spot, where everything went down,” she explains. “I just laid in the sand like how I was laying in the sand when all the paramedics were over me. That was very emotional.”

She and her twin sister Ellie even reenacted the moment when Ellie had held Lulu’s head in the sand that day. “The only thing I wanted to do was lay in the sand. And then even my friends were like, ‘Are you sure you wanna lay in the sand?’ And I was like, ‘Ellie, lay in the sand!’ I laid in the sand and then Ellie just put her hand under my head and we reenacted the scene and cried.”

“It was kind of like a peace of mind,” she says.

Lulu likes talking about what happened to her, though she has encountered other people who have experienced similar things who don’t

“It’s a real thing that happens to real people,” she says. “So people should know about it.”