When I was ten years old, a dog bit the back of my head. The doctor said, within earshot but out of sight – he didn’t think I could hear him – that had the dog’s teeth been a little longer, they could have gone in under my skull. Hit my brain stem. Killed me, crippled me.
I don’t know whether or not he was right. All I know is that for a decade and a half after that, I harbored a complete and unreasoning terror of dogs. It didn’t matter how big they were, or how tame, or how kind. Someone else could assure me that they were the best dog in the world, that they knew the dog, that he would never hurt anyone, and it didn’t matter, because I was convinced that any dog could suddenly turn on me, bite me hard enough to kill me.
There were two dogs I slowly learned to trust during that time period. And, eventually, I learned to understand dogs again, to understand their body language, to like them again, because my husband convinced me to get a puppy, to raise a dog from when it was small, that this would help me get over my fear.
No one ever told me I was crazy or irrational for not wanting to be around dogs after I’d been attacked and nearly killed by one. No one. For fifteen years, it was understandable that I would be afraid – terribly, unreasoningly afraid – of dogs. A dog attacked me. I bore the traumatic scars. I found dogs terrifying, unpredictable. I could not trust any of them – no matter how kind they’d been to my friends, no matter how well-recommended they came or how well they’d been raised – not to turn on me and injure me.
When I was fifteen, I was raped.
Do I even need to finish this?
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