Dog bites and wayward baseballs

It wasn't a great day here yesterday, starting when Katie got bitten by a dog while biking back from her first day as a camp counselor, and ending with Joe getting hit in the nose with a baseball while playing in the Tri County League.

First, the dog bite: Katie called me, crying, to ask if I could come get her right away because a German Shepherd had run out of its yard and across the street, chased her on her bike and bitten her, puncturing her shorts and making a bloody gash on her leg. Camp Lewis Perkins, the Girl Scout camp where Katie works, is close, right down Woodbridge Street, so I got there within minutes. We put the bike in the car and I knocked on the door of the house that the dog had run back into. The owner said that had never happened before (it shouldn't happen once!) and that the dog was current on his shots. I got his name and said I expected him to pay for any doctors' visits. He said he would.

When we got home, Katie recovered pretty quickly, but I couldn't stop shaking, my heart beating. I called the dog officer, who said Katie should go the the doctor and that I should send him the medical bills to be forwarded to the dog owner. So she went and got a tetanus shot and a prescription for antibiotics. Rabies is not a concern so much as infection. The doctor said she should come back in a week.

That night, Joe came home from baseball and asked me if I thought his nose was straight. Huh? It was straight, but he did have a bruise where a baseball had hit him. While he went to ice it and I brought him his dinner in the den, concerned now about him, we had a laugh over the time when he was a little kid and pretended that his nose was broken. He had been acting up, and I had given him a little push towards the stairs so he would go up to his room. Acting as though the push had propelled him against the wall across the room, he came back to me in the den with his little nose crooked and his hand holding on to it.

I freaked. "Oh my god, I broke your nose!" I cried. Game over, he let go of his nose and it popped back into position. The little comedian had been holding it so it looked crooked, just to make me have the reaction that I had.

Last night he said it was kind of like they were kids again. One had an accident riding a bike and the other had one while playing baseball.

Not to diminish the scare of the dog bite, I thought about how lucky we are to live in this peaceful valley and have such problems on a sunny summer day. I cannot imagine what it must be like for mothers whose children are getting shot in war zones around the world.