Had an unfortunate experience with a dog yesterday...and by "unfortunate experience," I mean, "a dog ate my face." I was sitting in my living room yesterday, when I heard a little girl screaming in the vineyard behind my house. I jumped the fence and ran out there, to find her about to be attacked by a pack of four marauding pit bulls...these things were huge, about 200-230 lbs each. I started yelling and throwing sticks at them, and got one of them to run off. Two others ran at me and jumped for me, but I managed to catch them in mid-air and knock their skulls together, putting them both out of commission. Unfortunately the last pit bull seized that opportunity to knock me off my feet, and he managed to get a pretty good chunk out of my upper lip before I could recover and beat him until he became a throw rug. I saved the girl, became a town hero, and now they're erecting a statue of me in the village square.
Artist's rendition of the vicious beast that attacked me
Okay, so the only true thing in the above paragraph is the "dog ate my face" part. But that story sounds much better than the truth, which basically amounts to: "I got my butt kicked by a 40-lb black lab." One of my friends was dogsitting this week for a new guy in the office. Unfortunately, the dogsitting friend is going to Sweden from today until Wednesday (to go dog-sledding, somewhat ironically), so I offered to watch the dog until then. So he brought the dog over to my house, and he seemed like a nice little guy. Pretty skittish, but I figured that was to be expected for a dog in a strange house. Well, my friend Jim left, and the little guy started whimpering and trotting around the house trying to find him.
Finally after about 15 or 20 minutes, he calmed down (or at least I thought he had). So I went over to give him some attention, leaned over to pet him, and BAM, he jumps up and chews off my lip. No growling, no baring of his teeth; nothing. Just jumps and bites. Quick little booger, too--he was back down on the ground before I realized what happened. Fortunately, the searing pain and the blood gushing onto the floor made me realize pretty quickly. Cleaned it out in the sink, and it looked like he had torn off half my lip. While holding my blood-soaked facecloth over my mangled mug, I called my friend to come back and get the dog the hell out of my house and called another friend to take me to the hospital.
So my friend Mark came and grabbed me and drove me to the Naval Hospital over at the support site base (~30 minutes away) and dropped me off there while he went to the Navy Exchange to shop for CDs. The good folks at the hospital flushed out the wounds (ouch) and looked at them with due concern. (Oh, coincidentally, the on-duty ER nurse happened to be a cute blonde girl I had taken out to dinner a couple months ago...) Then the ER doc presented me with two options: (1) he could call in the on-call Navy surgeon to sew up my lips, or (2) since the injury was in such a delicate cosmetic area and the Navy surgeon is sort of a general surgeon and the slightest mistake on his part could leave me disfigured for life, I could go to a plastic surgeon out in town and get it fixed up by a professional. So I was left to figure out which was the lesser of two evils: Navy medicine, or Italian medicine. Then they told me that the plastic surgeon they were going to send me to is one of the best in Naples (a metropolitan area of some 5 million people, don't forget) and that he worked in one of the best private clinics in town, not one of those sketchy Socialist state-run hospitals that scare the crap out of the Americans here. So I figured, hey, since your tax dollars are paying for whichever option I choose, I might as well go with the cosmetic doc.
So the Naval Hospital sent an interpreter along with me to the clinic to get me all settled in. Seemed like a nice enough place; according to her, it's the oldest private clinic in Naples, but it actually didn't look it. Checked in with the doctor, who said he had another patient before he could get to me. Also, he wanted me to stay overnight for observation purposes and so he could check on me in the morning and make sure everything had stayed in place while I slept. So they brought me up to the maternity ward where they gave me my own private room. It was actually quite nice - bed, couch, two chairs, and my own bathroom. Should have thrown a party in there. Anyway, I checked in there at like 3:00 , and had to wait until almost 5 before they brought me in to get my face sewn up. Between the three doctors in there, they spoke enough English to get me through it (although the body language and voice inflection for "hold still; this'll just hurt a little" is pretty universal). He said he was stitching up "on the inside;" no idea how that works, but apparently it does, because you can't see the stitches on the surface of my face. Only took like 15 minutes, and judging by what I can see of it now, he did a pretty great job. Might scar up a little, but not nearly as badly as it could have. I don't have a "before" picture (my desire for prompt medical attention precluded me from taking a couple snapshots), but the cut on the left side of my lip was a huge open gash--not all the way through the inside of my mouth, but about 1.5mm wide, and pretty deep. The picture at the top is the "after" picture...as if I wasn't ugly enough already...
So I stayed the night in my nice maternity ward room with the great view--overlooks the Bay of Naples, with Mt Vesuvius in the background. Unfortunately, I hadn't thought I was going to be spending the night, so I didn't bring any pajamas or sweatpants (or changes of underwear) with me when I left for the hospital. I think the guy at the subway station when I bought my ticket this morning thought I slept in a gutter last night, because that's about how I looked.
