Sarah Ziebro, 30, -- who has suffered from brain seizures (or auras, precursors to seizures) for nearly a decade -- had rescued the dog from a neglectful owner in 2011, but relatives said the animal had never shown any aggressive tendencies in the time she has owned it.
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| Sarah Ziebro of Florida, formerly of Parma, Ohio, was attacked last month by her a pit bull that she had rescued last year. This photo shows Ziebro in a previous hospital stay before the attack. |
That changed on July 23, when Ziebro began to complain to her mother about numbness on one side of her body and then went into a convulsion.
"Whether this dog was startled, or something else, we'll never know," her brother, John Ziebro said Tuesday in a telephone interview. "But as Sarah seized helpless on the ground, the dog attacked her.
Until this assault, the dog had never displayed any form of aggression towards Sarah, and was normally quiet and docile."
Sarah Ziebro was unconscious when the dog bit her face and neck. Her carotid artery was torn and had her mother not arrived in a timely manner, she likely would have died, John Ziebro said.
Sarah Ziebro was taken to the Blake Medical Center in Bradenton, Fla. for surgery to stem the flow of blood and piece her face back together.
John Ziebro said the plastic surgeon who worked on his sister, Dr. Melinda Lacerna, told him that the facial injuries were among the worst she had ever seen from a dog bite.
The surgery required over 600 sutures and four hours of surgery to repair her mangled facial features, he said.
Sarah Ziebro, who is now staying with her parents in Bradenton, also goes to Blake Medical Center in Bradenton for physical therapy. She is relearning how to control her face and lips, and how to talk because of damaged facial nerves. She was recently taken off a feeding tube after regaining the ability to swallow.
When Sarah Ziebro was 18, she was diagnosed by the Cleveland Clinic as having Cavernous Angioma, also known as CVM, which is a compact mass of blood vessels, which bleed, in the right temporal lobe of her brain.
"Sarah was born with a malfunction in her brain," John Ziebro said. "But that malfunction was not apparent until further testing was done in 2007."
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| Animal Control removes her pit bull after the attack |
Ziebro said his sister began suffering seizures in her early 20's. Because she was self-employed as a cosmetologist, she was unable to obtain health insurance to cover surgery.
He said she was forced to try and prevent seizures with as variety of anti-epileptic drugs, many of which had harmful side effects or left her unable to function on a daily basis.
Ziebro said Sarah was able to find one medication, which kept her seizures under control enough to obtain a driver's license. That lasted less than a year as she had a seizure while driving 50 miles an hour and totaled the car. The accident caused no injuries to Sarah or anyone else, he said.
Last year, she was able to meet with some sympathetic doctors at the Cleveland Clinic whom John Ziebro said approved her for financial aid.
"The Cleveland Clinic did a phenomenal job of assessing Sarah's malformation and coming up with a surgical plan," he said. "Our family was excited when the operation – for the right lobe temporal resection to remove the CVM -- was successfully completed this year (on Feb. 10) and she began her recovery."
(Cleveland.com - August 7, 2012)
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