Pit bull perils: How I survived an attack

I am lying on a cot in the Chester County Hospital emergency room, my right side bruised, bleeding, swollen, and throbbing in pain. In curtained cubicles all around me, people are moaning and groaning in varying degrees of discomfort and agony.

It’s a few ticks after midnight on December 21, the winter solstice, and a date that also marks my late father’s birthday. As luck would have it, it’s the ER’s busiest night of the year thanks to an intense rainstorm and flooding that triggers rampant traffic accidents throughout the county. A cavalcade of casualties pours into the jam-packed facility on a night punctuated by wailing ambulance sirens and paramedics guiding patientladen gurneys up and down the hallways. While a few nurses summarily check in on me to gauge my vital signs, no doctor appears until well after 3 a.m., more than three hours after being admitted. The doctor first thanks me for my patience and assures me it has been a VERY eventful night at the ER.

She then asks, “So what happened?” I explain that my injuries are the result of a most unlikely and very odd set of circumstances, then go on to provide her with these details:

I’m playing poker with five other people at a friend’s house, our first time at this host’s home. During the game, the host’s dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier mixed breed, spends the evening hanging out near the poker table munching on a meaty hambone. We have been playing cards since about 7 p.m. A little after 11 p.m. I make a trip to the bathroom. Then, as I stroll back to the poker table, I glimpse a sudden flash of brown and white out of the corner of my eye as the 65-pound dog inexplicitly and out of nowhere, lunges at my throat.

I reflexively throw up my right arm to shield my neck and face from the attack. Consequently the dog sinks his ample teeth into my underarm and latches on. He bites down hard then holds on and shakes for a few moments before finally letting go.

My crying out in pain and distress instantly catches the attention of the poker players who quickly rush to my aid. Without delay I apply hydrogen peroxide and alcohol to the wound in hopes of staving off any infection. My anguished host and his wife tell me they’ve owned the eight-year-old dog for the past six years and insist they’ve never had one single problem with it. But as far as I’m concerned, I’d nothing to provoke the attack (and had even petted the dog at one point). I realize I’m extremely lucky that he tore into my armpit and not my throat, neck or face. After that I drove myself here, to the ER.

“Let’s take a look,” says the doctor, pulling back the sleeve of my hospital gown. As soon as she sees the extent of the damage inflicted by the bite, her eyes go wide with concern and I know that’s not a good sign. “The bite may have pierced a significant blood vessel,” she worries. “We’ll need to do a CT-Scan and find out.” So for the next few hours they do blood work and then perform the scan. Fortunately, the procedure indicates that the dog’s crushing jaws had missed the blood vessel, otherwise she tells me, my injuries would have required vascular surgery. “So how’d you do in the poker game?” she asks. I tell her I had won a hundred dollars or so. “That ought to be enough to cover your co-pays,” she grins.

They dress the wound, give me a tetanus shot and ten days worth of antibiotics and send me on my way. I don’t leave there until around 7:00 in the morning. But first I’m directed to fill out a bite report. I feel oddly conflicted knowing what the canine consequences are certain to be. Despite the owners’ assurances that their dog had never acted up before, I know the night’s episode does not bode well for his future as he now poses an unacceptable risk to anyone who might come into contact with him. The only positive aspect is that the dog attacked me and not some helpless, defenseless child.

As a lifelong dog person myself, I’m well aware of how devastating it is to lose a pet under any circumstances, and I felt terrible for the dog’s owners on that count, a childless couple who loved and cherished their dog as they would a member of their own family. They would be inconsolably grief stricken by the inescapable conclusion to this series of events. But the aggressive actions of their Staffordshire bull terrier mix (one of the breeds commonly referred to as a pit bull) at my expense had sealed his fate. Although the dog was up to date on its rabies shots, it nonetheless remained under observation for the requisite 10 days before being put down, a heart wrenching outcome for the owners.

I myself have never had any other encounter with any of the so-called pit bull breeds. I grew up with an assortment of cocker spaniels and German shepherds and, as an adult, have owned, bred, raised, and hunted English springer spaniels since 1974. In fact, on my initial date with my future wife I welcomed my very first English springer puppy into my home. My current canine companions are an English springer spaniel and my daughter’s pair of teacup Yorkshire terriers that tip the scales at around five pounds apiece. I understand why folks own sporting dogs and toy dogs like ours, but I have to admit that, given the history and reputation of the breed, I fail to comprehend the fascination some people have for the pit bull or the appeal of pit bull ownership. Nonetheless, this oft vilified dog (pit bull is actually not a breed, but an umbrella term that includes many breeds that descended from bulldogs and terriers), boasts many devoted advocates and dedicated defenders who passionately proclaim the pit bull “breeds” should not be condemned because of a few bad actors.

On one level that point of view appears reasonable, yet it seems as though pit bulls and pit bull attacks are routinely in the news. Within a week of my unfortunate episode, a report of a pair of pit bulls attacking and killing a leashed Bichon Frise while mauling and maiming its owner as he walked his pet aired on a Philadelphia TV station. Other equally horrific accounts and worse are commonplace. Initially, pit bull breeds were was trained for bull baiting and dog fighting, and evolved tremendous jaw strength and an aggressive swagger along the way. My dogs’ veterinarian, who remains wary of the breed, noted that these dogs can exert 600 pounds of pressure with their jaws. This, along with their tendency to hold on and shake, is why the bite of a pit bull like the one I endured can be so devastating, destructive, and disfiguring.

A five-year review of dogbite injuries from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia back in 2009 revealed that almost 51 percent of all canine attacks were from pit bulls. Another study showed that from 2005 to 2017, 433 Americans were reported killed by canine attacks. Pit bulls accounted for 284 (that’s 66 percent) of those deaths despite the fact that the dog represents only about six percent of the country’s entire canine population. These kinds of statistics help explain why ownership of pit bull terriers is banned under the Dangerous Dogs Act in the United Kingdom.

But such damning data does not dissuade American advocates, who remain undeterred in their defense of these dogs. They insist that a pit bull makes for a loving, friendly, gentle pet. At least, until, in an abrupt outburst of unbridled ferocity, it doesn’t. A lesson I learned the hard way.

I’ll add that there is an amazing and eerie twist of fate that accompanies this tragic story, one that reaches back more than forty years to the time I served as a high school English teacher. The episode occurred during my first period tenth grade class the day before Christmas vacation in 1976. I was halfway through the day’s lesson when I noticed one of my students had put his head down on his desk, something I never permitted in my classes. Straight away I rousted him only to find his response incoherent and his eyes rolled back in his head as he was on the verge of passing out. I immediately enlisted two other students to escort him to the nurse’s office where he collapsed, unconscious, onto a cot. Barely able to detect a pulse, the alarmed nurse immediately summoned an ambulance to the scene.

I soon learned that just before school that morning a number of students had taken part in a covert drinking party in the school’s woodlot to celebrate their upcoming Christmas break. There, in a foolish feat of sophomoric hijinks calculated to impress his buddies, my tenth grader chugged an entire fifth of whisky pilfered from his parents’ liquor cabinet. Without intervention the alcohol poisoning that ensued would probably have killed him. Learning the source of the student’s distress, paramedics pumped his stomach on the way to the hospital where he stayed under observation overnight. The school nurse would later inform me that I most likely had saved the young man’s life by acting as swiftly as I had. Had I waited until the end of class, it would have been too late.

Thankfully that tenth grade grader recovered fully and, as an adult, went on to become a successful, prosperous, and well respected member of his community. Oh, and one other thing — he recently joined our weekly poker party. And yes, he was the guy who hosted the poker game that fateful evening. That’s right, it was my former student’s whose-life-I-saved dog that attacked me and sent me to the ER that night, an event which, in a remarkable coincidence, also occurred the week before Christmas as did his alcoholic misadventure more than forty years before. They say that no good deed goes unpunished and, as my wife points out, it took more than forty years, but this one, in the most literal sense possible, finally came back to bite me.