I Don’t Know My Own Strength: How I Almost Gouged My Eye Out

Today I almost gouged my eye out. Now when I tell you the story it may not sound that dramatic, but let me tell you, it was!!!

The day started out normal enough. I went to work and greeted all the dogs and cats staying with us right now, and fed/watered everyone. During this I scraped my left arm on a kennel door that was sticking out a bit. Not a big deal, it kind of hurt and left a scratch, but that happens somewhat frequently.

We have quarantine dogs in boarding that we’re the guinea pigs, as I call it, for taking care of them. Normally they’re there because they’ve bit someone, and we’re watching them to see if they’re rabid. Hence the ‘guinea pig’ term; we get attacked if they do turn out rabid. We keep them there for ten days; if they were rabid at the time of the biting, within ten days they’ll be dead. So I guess we morbidly find out that way. Usually I think someone just provoked them until they’d had enough and nipped at someone, since they normally are super sweet dogs.

Right now we have three quarantined dogs, two of which came in together. One of those two, we in boarding don’t do anything with. He tried to attack one of the vets, and they don’t even like dealing with him! I don’t know if he’s actually rabid; I think he may just have had a bad life sadly. The other one has been really sweet to me, and always gets excited when he sees me come in. He’ll jump up and try to give me kisses, but as Lucas brought to my attention, I should be careful about letting him give me kisses on my face, as that could easily change into a bite. Sounds obvious, but I actually hadn’t thought about that. So I fed him, and he scratched my right arm up jumping up on me. That happens all the time too, so not a big deal there. And he wasn’t being malicious-just excited.

Now it’s time to walk everyone! Ella, the three-legged kitten the vet rescued and now lives at the vet clinic, was hanging around the back and kept running into the boarding room. She’s not allowed back there, so I kept the door shut between taking dogs out so she wouldn’t sneak in. All was going well, until I went to get the fourth to last dog. They’re always excited to go outside and do their business, and this dog was no different. I couldn’t get the leash around his neck because he was moving around so much. He started to get around me and run loose, and that’s when it happened.

Now as I mentioned, I’d been shutting the door behind me. I should do this every time I’m getting the dogs out, but no one does because the dogs normally don’t escape and I guess maybe we’ve just gotten lazy or something. That’s not the point though! Ha. So had I been thinking about that, I would have realized even if he got out of his kennel, there was nowhere for him to go and it didn’t really matter. I didn’t think about this though, since I’m used to leaving the door open, and figured he’d run crazily through the entire clinic.

I’m not even sure how it happened exactly, I think I went to shut the door and try to push him back into the kennel at the same time, and he moved into me and past me. My head was in just right the place, and BAM!! the latch hit me right next to my eye.

Same exact type of latch we have at the vet clinic

Pain instantly shot through my face and knocked me back (that may have been the dog too) and my eye watered up. I got up to go get the dog, who was just standing by the door like, “What are you waiting for!?” I had to blink quite a few times to be able to see, and then I went outside with him. I didn’t know what it looked like, all I knew was it hurt like crazy. It felt like someone punched me right in the eye, and I was wondering if was bruising or anything. I touched it and there was a little bit of blood on my finger, but not much. All around my eye and my cheek bone hurt like hell!

When he was done doing his stuff, we went back in and I grabbed a little mirror out of my purse to look at it. It was bleeding a little bit, but was just red, not as bad as I thought it would look! However, IT WAS SO CLOSE TO MY EYE! Had my head been turned just a teeny tiny bit, I probably would have done some pretty bad damage to my eye. The latch somehow gouged a tiny bit of skin out, and scratched it a little bit.

LOOK AT THAT CUT AND HOW CLOSE IT IS TO MY EYE!!!!

Now yes, I could be overreacting a little bit, but man it STILL hurts and that was four hours ago now. Plus the picture doesn’t even do it justice. 😉 So I have superhuman strength when closing kennel doors apparently, and that’s the story of how I almost gouged my eye out. Luckily it’s doing just fine, other than hurting now! I hope everyone had a much safer day today!!