Saturday, August 27, 2011

Lucky to be alive

UNITED KINGDOM -- Seeing the most horrific injuries – some too terrible to show in this paper – suffered by five-year-old Karl “Mitch” Morson who was this week mauled by a Rottweiler, he’s lucky to be alive.

That’s what his mam Lisa, 30, and grandad Dave, 70, know as they look at the scarring to his face he will live with for the rest of his life.

Lisa is still in shock, traumatised and having flashbacks of the horror that will live with her, seeing blood streaming from her son’s ravaged face.

Karl Morson, aged 5, in Sunderland Royal Hospital,
after being attacked near his Sulgrave, Washington,
home by a Rottweiler dog.

She went into such shock, she couldn’t do anything after pals he had been playing with raced to their Sulgrave home telling her that a dog had attacked him.

Dave took the little fella, who had tried to fight off the dog which had pinned him to the ground, straight to Sunderland Royal.

Looking at his terrifying injuries, it is amazing how skillfully Mitch has been repaired.

What expertise this took by surgeons in a two-hour op. Now Mitch is home recovering physically and emotionally, Dave tells me: “He could have lost his life, The dog’s been destroyed but they shouldn’t be allowed to roam freely.”

Dangerous dogs in this country are on the increase and serious attacks on young children by savage dogs rose by 14 per cent in 2009. The dogs mauled 1,942 under-10s so badly they needed hospital treatment.

And the majority of these savage attacks on children, including many babies and toddlers are by “family pets”.

Now little Mitch is another statistic, another child who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So too was a young mother, who this week suffered severe hand injuries, saving her two children in another dog attack.

Karen Greaves, 31, fended off a bull mastiff that had killed their King Charles spaniel puppy, then leapt at her four-month-old daughter’s buggy as she picnicked in a Manchester Park with baby Amelia and Dylan, five.

She said: “I thought the worst. I feared for them so I lay across the back of it and put my hands in its mouth.”

(Sunderland Echo - August 26, 2011)