Nate and a Dog

Last week Nate and Micah were at a friends playing when their dog got off their porch. He ran to be near Nate and when Nate grabbed his collar so they could put him back in the porch the dog bite him on his ear. The dog tore off a good size piece of skin at the top peak of his ear and around the back. We were able to take him to the two private clinics in town pretty quickly with the piece of skin in tow but no doctors at either of the clinics because it was a holiday. Got to love medical care in Mozambique.....Ended up coming home and asking our next door neighbor, a veteran missionary from Ohio, who was an army medic to come over and help me try to clean it and reattach the skin. There really wasn't the option of sewing it back on (actually most suggest you don't do that with dogbites anyway) since there wasn't alot to attach it to in the back so we cleaned it well and layed the skin back on hoping it will reattach. It does not cover the whole torn area but we are hopeful that his ear will look quite normal although he is sure to have some scaring. Have had a couple of Canadian nurses take a look and they don't think the skin is going to reattach but instead form a scab and come off. We will have to wait and see. We have him on preventative antibiotics as well as keeping it slathered with antibiotic ointment and covered when he goes outside or sleeps. He is doing great. Not much slows him down we learned that when he was in two full leg casts and would scoot himself around on with a flip flop under his bum on the polished cement floors of our house in 2007 after he had fallen in the well. This is only a minor side track for him in comparison.

The white patch is the skin we replaced.

It looks very dramatic since we used a surgical mask to cover his ear and then bandaged it so he could not hurt it while he slept.

Thanks for always praying for our kids as we live this often crazy life!