Vera

I have a 7 month old pit bull puppy named Vera. She is my baby; she grew up sleeping on my chest in a little ball, and now she is the best-natured, smartest, prettiest dog I know. Yesterday around 5 pm, I received a call from a friend saying that Vera had somehow managed to get out of the back yard (she is like a magician, she can find a way out of anywhere) and had bitten the next door neighbor's rooster. He also said that the lady had told him "Wait until you see what I did to her dog." I immediately left work and came home to see what was going on. I saw that there was a crowd gathered around the next door neighbor's house, so I went over there and asked her what had happened and if I could help. The lady started screaming and cursing at me, even though I was only trying to see if I could do anything help the rooster or the situation. When I saw that I wasn't getting anywhere with her, I started asking around about what had happened to my dog. The woman then told me herself that she had cut my baby's ear off. I told her she must be crazy to do a thing like that, and she came out of her house, spit in my face, and attacked me in the middle of the street. When someone finally pulled her off of me, I went straight to the police station to make a police report. I called 911 and the police came in less than 10 minutes. They immediately went to her house and arrested her. They called me to come back to my house and it was then that I saw Vera for the first time since the incident. She was missing one of her ears completely and was drenched in blood. One of the neighborhood kids said that he had followed a trail of blood in the alley and it eventually lead to Vera. Another little boy handed me a baggie with her ear in it that he had saved for me. When I thought that I had heard and seen it all, the kids told me that the lady had also come onto my porch where my puppy was sitting by the door waiting to be let in and beat her with brass knucles. I ended up taking my dog straight to the vet and they sent me to a 24-hour animal hospital in Southfield. There, they told me that about half of the skin on Vera's head was missing, as though she had been scalped. The area without skin was so large that they would need to do skin grafting, and the whole surgery would cost five thousand dollars. They wanted $3500 up front. Since I didn't have the money, I paid two hundred dollars to stablize her on pain killers and antibiotics and bandage her head. I took her home with me with the understanding that I would now have to take her to the vet's office daily for her wounds to be cleaned and rebandaged, in the hopes that the tissue on her head will regenerate on its own. The vet is charging me $50 dollars per day for this. I made this ChipIn account because I need help paying for all of the vet bills and the skin grafting surgery. The vet has given me an estimate of $1000 which should cover the next few weeks of treatment, but this figure will fluctuate based on how Vera progresses. If there is anyone who has a soft spot for pets, I would ask you for any donation you can make. No one, people or animals, deserve that type of treatment and it makes me feel so terrible to think that my puppy was just waiting by the door for me to let her in, and then was blindsided by this. Thank you for taking the time to read this, I appreciate it.