“I may have lost my face, but I haven’t lost my personality,” she said, consoling her mom in the emergency room, two days before Thanksgiving.
That day, Gracie was visiting her grandfather, Ray Kaighn of Logan. Kaighn lives just a mile away and is actively involved with his grandchildren. He had just returned from a vacation, and Gracie couldn’t wait to see him.
Kaighn said he had been hesitant to have the dog in his home, but agreed because Atticus had been a one-owner dog, raised from the time he was a puppy. He was well-mannered and patient with children — until suddenly he wasn’t.
He left the basement area, only to return a short time later, angry and violent. Kaighn said the dog lunged through the basement door and took a flying leap at Gracie, completely fixated on her.
As the dog’s teeth sank into Gracie’s face, Kaighn grabbed Atticus by the harness and fought against his strength to pull the dog away from the child, causing Atticus to turn his attention toward him instead as the dog’s owner raced down the stairs to contain him.
Kaighn admits he panicked when he saw Gracie’s injuries, but he called 911.
“They did a marvelous job of settling me down and keeping me from going nuts,” he said.
Emergency responders from Logan’s Station 72 were at the Kaighn home within minutes and they rushed her to the hospital.
Kaitlyn Myers is a registered nurse who was working at Logan Regional Hospital that day when Gracie came rolling into the emergency room, a setting that is often scary for children, especially after traumatic events.
“She was just so brave,” Myers said. “Her parents were really upset and she was calming them down and telling them it would be OK … she was just so strong.”
Gracie was taken into surgery about 90 minutes after she arrived, and two days later, she was home again. She had stitches scattered from cheek to cheek, but amazingly, the wounds to her face narrowly missed her eye and her ear.
One of the first things she did when she got home was to create a sign with her mantra, “I am beautiful, and I can do anything.”
To see her now as she does her catwalk across the basement of her home two and a half weeks later, it is clear that she believes it.
While she is relishing the extra long holiday break from school, she isn’t entirely off the hook — her grandpa studies with her every day, exasperating her with much more science than she is interested in.
She uses Facetime to keep up with mathematics in her fourth-grade class at Woodruff Elementary, and, teacher Kristine Lowder has been visiting her home to tutor her in other subjects so she doesn’t fall behind.
Lowder said the news of the dog attack left her torn up for days.
“I taught her last year … she is so bubbly, a happy-go-lucky kind of girl who was the life of our class,” she said. “She is like having a blanket wrapped around you all the time and she is still so loving and worried about everyone more than herself.”
Lowder was one of a long list of people who visited Gracie in the hospital, and a few days later she visited the family’s home to do Gracie’s nails.
“I found her giving me more comfort and I knew then she was going to keep being Gracie,” Lowder said. “She is just a reminder that everything, with time, will be OK.
Gracie has touched many people in a similar way, and the proof is in the mailbox. Gracie’s stepdad, Chuck Meyer, said something has arrived in the mail almost every day since then.
She has received comfort in numerous fuzzy blankets, piles of stuffed animals, and bright colorful flowers that mirror her personality — and she couldn’t wait to share the cookies that were so beautifully wrapped and left beneath the Christmas tree.
She treasures the notes from her class whether her name is spelled correctly or not, and she marveled at the paper snowflakes.
Gracie’s mom, Kimberly Miller, said her little girl has never missed a beat since she came home. She will return to gymnastics next week, where she will help coach because she isn’t allowed to do cartwheels just yet.
Miller marvels at Gracie’s spirit every day, saying she has only broken down once. She never hesitates to come home to her two dogs, and when she visited her grandparent’s home, she was never a bit worried about running down to the basement where she had been so brutally attacked — and she was upset when she learned Atticus would be put down as a result.
“I don’t want him to die, I just don’t want to see him again,” she told her family.
(Herald Journal - December 12, 2015)
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