A dog owner claims she found herself in intensive care after getting knocked over by her over excited dog.
Erin Stevenson had been watching her Staffordshire bull terrier Skyy – who sometimes struggles to control her ‘excitement’ – playing when the pooch hurtled towards her and headbutted her in the chin.
The following day the 41-year-old says her neck started to ache but she assumed she had a throat infection and planned to make a doctor’s appointment.
When the speech therapist woke up at 3am on the third day with a swollen neck and trouble swallowing, she knew something was wrong but still suspected it was a bad throat infection.
Erin, from Chicago, Illinois, said: ‘It hurt but I didn’t think much of it, I just thought it was from the impact.
‘Two days later, my throat started to hurt. I thought it was strep throat. I was planning on going to see a doctor but I woke up at around 3am and I couldn’t swallow.
‘I woke my husband and said I was going to the emergency room to get antibiotics for strep throat.’
However, when Erin got to hospital a CT scan revealed two of her molars were cracked and she had developed a serious infection.
‘There was significant swelling on one side of my face. I had a CT scan, antibiotics and steroids,’ she said.
‘They didn’t know what it was. They thought maybe it was a haematoma or a broken jaw.’
With Erin’s neck swelling doctors feared her airways become blocked so the decision was taken to sedate her and put her on a ventilator.
Erin says she messaged her husband before she was whisked into intensive care to tell him she loved him.
‘I was incubated and put on life support,’ Erin said.
‘Unbeknown to me, Skyy had cracked two of my molars and I’d developed an abscess which had caused the swelling.
‘Doctors removed two of my teeth and put a drain in my neck to drain out the infection.
‘They left me on life support to make sure there were no secondary infections but I did develop a second one which was drained and finally resolved the problem.’
Four months on from the incident, Erin says the ‘nightmare’ isn’t over as she is still unable to open her mouth up fully which is ‘a bit of a nightmare’.
‘Skyy had no idea the trouble she’d caused but my husband did say she know something was going on,’ Erin added.
She said while Skyy had caused mischief in the past, the most recent event was the worst.
‘I once got call from the neighbour saying don’t worry but they had Skyy which really confused me because when I left her, she was in a crate,’ Erin said.
‘When I got home, they said she’d escaped the crate and bitten through the wall. They are saints, my husband said he was surprised they didn’t kill her.
‘People said if they didn’t know me then they wouldn’t believe this had happened.’
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