I owe regular readers a word of explanation for the recent silence in this space. I was bitten by a dog.
This is not, in the great scheme of things, a big deal. People are being starved in Gaza, massacred in Sudan, arrested in Hong Kong. My problem was minor. But it wasn’t minor for me.
In the first place, for a while I could not type. In fact I had for a week a taste of what my father (his right side paralysed by a stroke) had to put up with for two decades. The hand I usually do things with was not available (I am left-handed) and the other one turned out to be incompetent. Even eating was an embarrassment.
The actual experience of being bitten – small teeth sinking into my hand – was not that traumatic. As a promiscuous petter of other people’s dogs I have always known that something like this was possible. The person walking the dog, who was not the owner and had not been warned about his charge’s homicidal propensities, was more upset than I was.
The treatment is another matter. My local GP sent me to the Chinese U hospital, which for some obscure reason they prefer to call the Chinese University Medical Centre. It has an Emergency Medicine Department. Is there something behind this preference for different labels? Do they not want accidents?
Anyway the standard treatment for dog bites these days involves keeping the wound open for a week or two until any chance of infection can be excluded. I do not dispute the medical justification for this, and indeed it has worked as intended. But if you judge the efficacy of a medical procedure by the amount of pain involved then this one really gives you your money’s worth.
Every day I was wheeled into the ominously numbered Room 13, where a nurse (you only get a doctor for the needlework) would squirt disinfectant into my holes, wipe them with the surgical version of those sticks with a cotton bud on the end which people stick in their ears, and stuff them with lint, which would be pulled out at the beginning of the next day’s session and examined for evidence of corruption.
The nurses were all skillful professionals who were kind, careful and as gentle as the circumstances permitted. They were all women young enough to be my grand-daughters. So etiquette, at least for males of my vintage, demanded that a stoical indifference to pain should be deployed, or at least simulated.
Post-operative recovery was aided by a fun fact about the CUMC: it has a super coffee bar. If you’re down that way it’s “worth a detour”, as the Michelin people used to say.
Long-term consequences? My left hand is now fully functional, though it still has some interesting scars. I have noticed that at some sub-conscious level I no longer feel so confident around dogs. Some furry friend I have been fondling for months will come bouncing up and my hand twitches a bit, and avoids his mouth. This may pass, I hope.
It would be unfair to blame a whole breed for the actions of one individual but I am avoiding him and his relatives anyway. I am confirmed in my suspicion that pedigree dogs, like thoroughbred racehorses and Hapsburg emperors, are often inbred and consequently may land on the mental health scale somewhere between “highly strung” and “barking mad”.
Adopt an interesting local mixture from one of Hong Kong’s many dog rescue organisations and you will not get an entry in the canine Almanach de Gotha, but you will also not finish up with a psychopooch.
Happily I am still on cuddling terms with the lovely Lemon:
tim's experiment 