the dog incident revisited

One year ago tomorrow, on July 21, 2008, I had my stomach fairly badly mauled by a dog that looked more or less like this:

I had just moved to my new neighborhood, near the new campus, two hours earlier. Tired of unpacking, I went out for a walk just before dusk.

I noticed this dog right away. It was walking off to my left, in a parallel path to mine. It walked straight past the open door of a mosque without even looking in. It seemed agitated. After it passed the mosque it made the first of several weirdly abrupt right-angled turns, taking it on a circuit around the mosque’s large parking lot.

As I approached the driveway into the parking lot, I noticed the dog heading right for me, very incautiously, at a speed that would have put it straight into the path of onrushing traffic. No one wants to see a dog get hit by a car. So I bent over in the dog’s path and started encouraging it, in baby talk, to slow down or it was going to get hurt.

It must have still been 20 meters away at that point. To my surprise, it slowed down not at all. It came straight up to me at a constant speed. Then, to my shock, the dog bit right into the left side of my stomach with a ferocious-sounding growl. It kept on growling as we wrestled for about 5 to 10 seconds. That dog weighed a lot! I’m not a small person either. It was quite a wrestling match, if a short one. Then the dog let go and walked off across the street as though nothing at all had happened.

A group of children across the street had witnessed this incident from the balcony, and began screaming to their friends on the ground to run away. I looked down and my shirt was torn to bloody shreds.

Eventually, I flagged down a local bus, which took me to the neighborhood hospital. The doctor there literally gave me the shirt off his back… Well, it wasn’t on his back at the time, since he was in his doctor’s uniform, but he gave me his civilian shirt to replace the nice shirt that had been torn apart by the dog.

A child had been bitten just before me, presumably by the same dog. Later I learned of two other children who had been bitten, including, by a strange coincidence, the nephew of AUC Vice Provost Ali Hadi, with whom I work closely.

The dog was not foaming at the mouth, but I researched rabies fairly diligently in the days following the incident, and it seems that foaming at the mouth is a final-stage symptom that appears when the animal is no longer able to swallow.

A few days later there was news that the dog had been killed, though I don’t know when. No one ever asked me for a description of it, but it was behaving so erratically that it would have been hard for the police to miss. Egypt is awash with rabies, and it is said that Cairo alone has 17 strains of canine rabies. Dogs here are not usually beloved pets as they are in most Western countries. They are usually more like semi-feral street animals, and treated as such. It’s generally a good idea to stay away from loose dogs in this country, and this incident was a stark reminder of that fact.

And yes, of course I went to get the rabies shots. The dog was so obviously rabid that I didn’t bother inquiring if tests had been done on its corpse. (I wouldn’t have trusted a negative verdict anyway. Better safe than sorry.)

The shots are not as bad as many of my generation might assume. We all grew up horrified of rabies shots, because back then it was 20-some shots in the abdomen with a giant needle. Now, it’s nothing but harmless pricks in the shoulder; things have changed. The real problem with rabies shots is what a pain they are for your schedule. You have to get them on days 0, 3, 7, 14, and 28 after the bite.

Also, not every place in Cairo had the vaccine. My neighborhood hospital did not. I had to go to a hospital in Heliopolis to get the one on Day 0, a few hours after the incident. After a brief and confusing wait, I did receive the first shot, and it was free of charge. The problem was that two nurses (woefully underpaid here) then grabbed my shirt, begging for a tip. I gave tips to both of them, but they immediately called in all their nurse friends, even ones who’d had nothing to do with my case, and I had to tip them all not to cause a mini-riot. Then the guy at the gate wanted a big tip, and so forth.

I decided I didn’t want to go through that again. So, it was arranged for one particular pharmacy in Garden City, near the AUC old campus, to have my vaccine on each appropriate day. It was about $15 per shot, which is cheap anyway, and certainly cheaper than all the tips I had to give to make it out of the hospital uninjured or at least unhated.

And here’s the fun part, completely unknown in the West… The pharmacy handed me the vaccine along with an ice pack, put them both in a plastic bag, and allowed me to walk it myself to the AUC medical clinic, where an AUC nurse would inject me each time.

I wondered if the vaccine would work against all future bites as well, but was told that it would only last for a year. So, any further bites will send me through the process again, now that a year is up.

Our then-Provost heard my story, and told an even better one of his own. When his children were young, they attended a birthday party in the southern suburb of Ma’adi. There was a cute little puppy at this party, but the cute puppy happened to have rabies. It bit every child at the party, which I think was a dozen or more. And this was back in the bad old days of really terrible, painful rabies shots.

For some months there was a fairly interesting, scary-looking scar on my stomach that was a hit at parties. But now it’s so well-healed that I have to look very closely to find it. It looks almost like slits from a razor blade rather than the scars of tooth-points.

A toast to Louis Pasteur, for keeping me alive!