A Boy and his Dogbite

As I approached our front door this evening coming home from work, my cell phone rang. It was Cathleen. She started talking to me in pig latin. She was saying two words, and I couldn't figure them out. My linguistic skills are pretty bad, but even I was embarrassed that it took me several "whats?" to understand what "og-day ite-bay" meant. I swear I was once a pretty smart kid, honest. After we were able to move beyond "dog bite," I was able to glean from her that Oscar had bitten Max, on the face, near his eye. "Be prepared for it to look bad," she advised me.

So I came in through the apartment door and Max rushed me for a hug as he (and Eliza) normally do (hands down, my favorite moment of the day), and then I saw his face. It was stunning that Oscar could do such damage. Nothing deep, but a pronounced scratch and cut just under Max's right eye, and another scratch-ish cut on his cheek. Max, apparently, had been cornering the dogs in the kitchen, preventing them from moving away from him, and despite several warnings from Cathleen that he was scaring the dogs and to back off, he didn't. And Oscar bit him.

Oscar is not a good dog, and by most standards is a bit of a bad dog. But this was new territory for him. Now what do we do? Turn the other cheek?

As for Max, Cathleen called our pediatrician's office. We now have the answer to the question, "what does it take to get a doctor on the phone?" The answer is, "my dog bit my child's face." She prescribed antibiotics, so he is now on amoxycillin for five days, and we smeared his face with bacitracin. He doesn't seem to be experiencing any level of discomfort, so either the bitemarks were indeed superficial, or Oscar severed Max's facial nerves. Most likely the former, but I'm no medical expert.