8 Staples Later

This afternoon, Biggy and I were headed to Blankets Creek to ride our bikes, and we got a call from Mamoo telling us she was on her way to the ER because her neighbor's German shepherd had bitten Lo while they were swimming. "I can't fix this," Mamoo said, which indicated it was bad. You could run your hand through a Cuisinart and Mamoo would try to fix it with betadine and a butterfly bandage. She also mentioned the word "chunk" at some point.

I spent the next half-hour's drive to Paulding Regional, vacillating between silently imagining Lo's gaping wound and how much pain she was in, and loudly cussing my mother for choosing "some podunk hospital, where I'm sure all the doctors got their degrees online and did their residencies in prisons."

Sure enough, the wound was ugly--I almost passed out when I saw it. But Lo was in a fat-man's wheelchair, still in her bikini, covered in blankets, not a tear in her eye. Mamoo whispered that Lo had asked her, soon after the bite, if she was going to have to have her leg amputated, so I attributed her calmness to relief. Lo recounted the details of the incident, how she'd been doing a cannon ball when the dog ran over to "save her," thinking she was falling into the pool.

When they took us back to the exam room, the nurse gave Lo a remote for the TV and the numbers for Nick, Cartoon Network, and Disney Channel, but this kid went straight to Animal Planet.