A Chicago dog owner was put on life support after her overexcited pet head-butted her in the chin and led to an injury that required serious medical attention.
Erin Stevenson, 41, shared a Facebook post that regaled how back in January, she and her Staffordshire Bull Terrier, named Skyy, had been engaging in an otherwise friendly romp outside.
The five-year-old pup then got what Ms Stevenson described as an excitable case of the “zoomies”, which is dog-owner shorthand for when canine’s get an explosive and seemingly unexplainable burst of energy that is typically only resolved by the animal darting back and forth around the room or yard, oftentimes in circles.
“My dog was doing zoomies and head butted me under my chin out of excitement,” she explained in the post.
Afterwards, the 41-year-old told Kennedy News that the initial bump into her chin didn’t raise any serious alarms. It wasn’t until three days later when she woke up and realised, she was unable to swallow that she decided a trip to the hospital was necessary.
Though Ms Stevenson’s initial symptoms presented doctors with a bit of a jigsaw to diagnose, they eventually determined that the dog’s head-butt had cracked her molars and caused a serious abscess in her jaw.
“It caused so much swelling in my face and neck that doctors were concerned that my airway was going to collapse,” she wrote in her Facebook post.
They made the decision to put Ms Stevenson on life support and intubate her so that she could breathe.
“I spent the week after Christmas on life support,” she added in her Facebook post. Two of her molars were removed and a tube was inserted into her neck to drain the abscess fluid from the infection that had spurred since the playful romp with her terrier.
Even though she was the one on life support, Ms Stevenson says her husband, Scott, 46, was the one who she believes really suffered the worst from the whole ordeal.
“I told him to tell my family I love them,” she told Kennedy News.
Eventually, she made it back home and is now only suffering one major side effect from the post-Christmas mishap with her playful pup.
“The one lingering injury I have is that now I can only open my mouth to a certain point which is a bit of a nightmare,” she told the news agency.
It appears that things in the Stevenson household are back to normal, as while sharing the harrowing story on Facebook last week, the 41-year-old introduced it by asking fellow dog-owners: “Can we please start a thread of fluke injuries that you have suffered as a result of your pupper?”
“I can’t be the only one…” she noted, before divulging the terrifying accident with her beloved Skyy.
In the post, she shared a picture of the dog a week after she’d been discharged from the hospital, and alongside it she quipped for fellow dog lovers not to “come after me about her nails”.
“That pic was taken about a week after I got released from the hospital, her nails were not our top priority & she was hiding under the dining room table because I was grinding her brother’s nails and she knew she was next.”
