A Happy Birthday
Published: June 11, 2005
A year after being bitten by a pit bull, Emma-leigh Chambers Allen is back to being just a kid.
Holding up all five fingers on one hand and just one on the other, Emma-leigh Chambers Allen shows exactly how old she turned on Wednesday.
“I’m the birthday girl,” she says. “I’m 6 today.”
As Emma-leigh helps make strawberry cupcakes at her aunt’s house in Jarales, she says she doesn’t remember much about her birthday last year — and that’s probably a good thing, said her aunt, Tabatha Chavez.
Emma-leigh wasn’t able to celebrate her fifth birthday the way her family had planned. Instead of blowing out candles on her birthday cake, she was lying in a hospital bed suffering from massive wounds to her face and head after being attacked by a neighbor’s pit bull.
But this year is a different story.
On Sunday, Emma-leigh’s family and friends with gather not only to celebrate the day she was born but to rejoice in the fact that this little girl’s struggle to survive has been successful.
One year ago
On June 6, 2004, two days before her fifth birthday, Emma-leigh had been playing outside her home in Los Chavez while, at the same time, helping her father, Chris, brother, Isaiah and her aunt, Teddie Sue, build a club house. Her father had just walked inside when the neighbor’s daughter called Emma-leigh over to play.
According to Tamara Chambers, Emma-leigh’s mother, as the little girl walked into the neighbor’s yard, the dog, which had been chained to a tree, attacked her daughter from behind. Although shocked at the sight, Isaiah ran over and, in an attempt to help his sister, he began hitting the animal with a wagon wheel.
When they boy’s repeated efforts yielded little effect, Isaiah rushed back home and informed his father of Emma-leigh’s predicament. As Allen reached his daughter, he picked up a large piece of concrete and struck the dog. This time, Emma-leigh was free, but still not out of the woods.
Lying in her father’s arms, Emma-leigh was bleeding profusely and wasn’t breathing. Determined to find help for his daughter, Allen, still holding his injured child, ran across a large field to the Los Chavez Fire Department.
As rescue personnel worked to save Emma-leigh, she began to breathe but was still unconscious. She was rushed to an Albuquerque hospital where her family waited and prayed while she underwent hours of emergency surgery.
Emma-leigh spent the first few days in the hospital on life support and in a coma. Her family, always at her bedside praying for a miracle, waited for 10 long days until they were finally able to bring their “Little Tiny” home.
Emma-leigh’s recovery
Today, Emma-leigh is a cheerful little girl who loves spending the day with her cousins assembling puzzles, playing with dolls and going swimming.
During her 10-day stay in the hospital last year, surgeons performed two major operations to try to help Emma-leigh. Not only did she have her jaw wired shut to mend a broken jaw, have more than 200 stitches sewn into her small head and deal with the fact that her nose, two vertebrae in her neck and many facial bones were broken, but it was later found out that her entire sinus and nasal passages had been crushed and the tear duct on her right eye had been detached.
“Her physical recovery was pretty quick,” said Tamara Chambers. “Her neck has healed up very well, but we’re still dealing with the sinus and nasal passages.”
According to Chambers, if someone doesn’t squeeze the mucus out of Emma-leigh’s eye at least six times a day, it will swell, turn black and become very painful. She said it was worse during the allergy season and the cold months of winter.
“Now, if she gets a cold, she can’t breathe because she’s only able to breathe from one side of her nose,” Chambers said. “She’ll sometimes wake up in the middle of the night gasping for air because she forgets to breathe out of her mouth.”
Emma-leigh’s injuries have also had some lingering effects, her mother said. Along with several bald spots on the back of her head, which Chambers believes were caused by the neck brace she had to wear for several months, her sense of taste is not what it was before the incident.
“A big chunk of her tongue was bitten off and that has also healed up nicely,” Chambers said. “She talks well, but the problem is, I think, some of the nerves are still at the surface. Before, spaghetti was her favorite food, but now she says certain sauces taste sour or tangy. It really bothers her.”
While most of Emma-leigh’s physical injuries have healed, Chambers said her daughter still has a long way to go. As the family continues to wait for word about when Albuquerque surgeons will repair her detached tear duct and crushed sinus and nasal passages, another surgery is currently being planned.
“We’ve gone to Galveston, Texas, three times in two months to the Shriners Children Burn Center talking to doctors who will be performing Emma-leigh’s plastic surgery,” Chambers said. “The doctors decided that they need to fix her nasal and tear duct before doing the reconstruction.”
Emotional scars
When asked about the first thing she remembered after the incident, Emma-leigh sat quietly for a few minutes and said, “I remember I was scared that my mom won’t get me back.”
The scars from the attack are still very apparent, and at times, will turn her contagious smile upside down. But it’s the scars that no one can see that have been the most worrisome for Chambers.
Emma-leigh’s recent trips to Texas have not only given the family hope that one day the scars will be gone, but they’ve given the 6-year-old a new understanding about what it means to be a survivor. The hospital where she will undergo reconstructive surgery is renowned for helping severely burned children.
“To them, Emmy is not that bad, it’s an easy in-and-out surgery, even though there is some underlying massive bone damage,” Chambers said. “But going to the hospital has really opened up Emmy’s eyes and has shown her that there are others in this world who are a lot worse off than her.”
Sometimes when Emma-leigh looks in the mirror, she doesn’t like what she sees. Although the scars have healed tremendously since she was released from the hospital a year ago, they are still very obvious.
“Sometimes she says she just wants to be human. She’ll say, ‘If that dog hadn’t got me, I wouldn’t be like this,’” her mom said. “She’ll call herself ugly and it breaks my heart.”
For the past year, Chambers has had a hard time letting Emma-leigh exert her independence — especially as the anniversary of the attack approached. In the back of her mind, Chambers waited and waited, wondering if something would happen.
It didn’t.
While Emma-leigh still gets sad, Chambers said her daughter’s emotional well-being has progressively gotten better. There are still times when she doesn’t understand why people stare.
“I sit there and watch and see how she reacts to it,” Chambers said. “If I feel she can’t handle it, I’ll intervene. But it’s not the kids; it’s the adults. Children will come up and ask her what happened, and she’ll tell them. But the adults sit and stare, and most of them don’t realize what they’re doing.”
During their first few visits to the Texas hospital, Chambers said Emma-leigh got a good dose of her own medicine when she first saw the burn victims. When Chambers noticed her daughter staring at the children, she reminded her daughter how she felt when people stared.
“I try to use that as a way to teach her,” Chambers said. “Instead of trying to figure out what happened, just go up and talk to them. She understands now that she doesn’t want to make other people feel how she feels when they stare.”
All the attention
During her yearlong recovery, Emma-Leigh got a lot of attention. With numerous visits from family, friends, the media and even strangers, Chavez said her niece knows she is special.
“When this happened, we couldn’t believe the outpouring of prayers, gifts, cards and warm wishes from people from all over,” Chavez said. “We sometimes think that the world if full of bad people, but we realized that that’s not true.”
When news of Emma-leigh’s condition hit the news stands and air waves, hundreds, if not thousands, of people contacted the family offering their support, Chambers said. It was a day of extreme sadness as well as a day of hope.
” No matter how bad you think the world is, it’s awesome. People to this day ask how she is doing,” Chambers said. “When she was in the hospital, I was with her almost 24-7 — right by her side. After she started to wake up, my mom or dad or sister would go in with her and I would creep out of the room for a breath of fresh air.
“The first thing I noticed was people lined up in the hallways of the hospital to go in and see her. My dad had to literally take three truckloads of toys, cards, balloons people sent to her in the hospital.”
Of the many gifts that Emma-leigh received, Chambers said she’ll always cherish a specific teddy bear sent anonymously. The address read: Pit bull attack victim, Albuquerque, N.M.
The hand-sewn teddy bear, which had Emma-leigh’s initials embroidered on its heart, is only one of the many gifts the Los Chavez girl still keeps close, remembering everyone who prayed for her recovery.
“I realize people are so sincere and they really do care,” Chambers said. “It means a lot to us that people care about her and she made a difference.”
Chambers said that it seems as if they can’t go anywhere without someone asking how Emma-leigh is doing. Not only was she recognized on the street, but she was also recognized by the governor a few months ago.
Gov. Bill Richardson invited Emma-leigh and her family to attend the signing of a dangerous dog law passed by the state legislature this year. Not only did she get to meet the governor, Emma-leigh was on hand to sign the bill herself.
“She was in his lap and hugging and kissing on him,” Chambers said.
“It was neat,” Emma-leigh said. “He was nice.”
Just a little girl
Putting her hand on her hip and walking across the living room as if it was a runway, Emma-leigh says she wants to be a model when she grows up. She loves lipstick, nail polish and makeup.
“It’s all about fashion, mother,” she’ll tell Chambers.
Like most little girls her age, Emma-leigh loves to play dress up — even if it’s modeling a scarf and coat during the hottest days of summer. “She’s a 16-year-old little girl,” her mother jokes.
She’s mature in more ways than one.
“She’s a very strong-willed little girl,” Chavez said. “She’s such an awesome kid. This may sound a little strange, but it couldn’t have happened to a better kid because she is so tough. She has shown us that if she can make it through this, our problems aren’t as bad as we think.”
In August, Emma-leigh will start first grade at the Belen Home School. Her mother and aunt home schooled Emma-leigh during her kindergarten year because they were concerned she would miss too many classes going to her numerous doctors’ appointments.
“She’s excited,” Chambers said. “She can’t wait to go to school.”
When asked what she wants for her birthday, the list is short and sweet.
“I want a necklace, a ring and a bracelet,” Emma-leigh says. “And a doll.”
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