Crash survivor Joanne Harris had finally been winning her battle back to health when an off-leash dog slammed into her stomach, sending her back into surgery.
It had taken the 49-year-old years to learn to walk again after barely surviving a head-on crash in November 2016 that took the life of her unborn baby.
So she feared the worst when she saw the powerful dog bounding towards her on Ōrewa Beach, north of Auckland, during last month’s long weekend marking Matariki (June 21).
Jumping and springboarding off her stomach, the dog hit with a punch that hurt, but Harris otherwise felt thankful to have escaped serious injury.
That was until later that night, when she felt excruciating pain.
She was soon vomiting and by Monday was rushed by ambulance to hospital.
Her bowel had burst after becoming knotted and blocked, she said.
She was taken into emergency surgery, with doctors cutting 80cm from her bowel, having warned her she was a high-risk patient because of her previous injuries, she said.
“If it happened to me three years ago, it likely would have killed me,” Harris said about the dog’s impact from her North Shore Hospital bed.
Losing 10kg on her liquid diet, she recovered enough post-surgery to go home, only to end up infected and back in hospital last week, she said.
That led a friend to post on the Torbay, Waiake, Long Bay, NZ Facebook page calling for the owners of the white dog to come forward.
Off-lead dogs are allowed on Ōrewa Beach during winter, but Harris claimed the white dog – while friendly - had been totally out of control, with its owners unable to catch it.
Just before turning and running at Harris, it had also forced another beach-goer to pick up their small dog and try to get away, she said.
She wanted the dog owners to come forward and accept accountability.
It comes as Auckland Council considers dangerous and roaming dogs a top priority and is “throwing all the resources” it has at the problem.
It received 16,730 reports about roaming dogs in the past year, plus 1341 reports of dog attacks on people and 1523 reports of dog attacks on other animals.
Auckland Council released a statement yesterday calling on the Government to give councils stronger powers to penalise dog owners and enforce Dog Control Act laws.
“Too many dog owners think it’s okay to let their dogs have a wander. It’s not,” Auckland councillor Josephine Bartley said earlier in the month.
“We have kids scared to walk to school and people living alone who don’t want to leave their homes in case they get bitten.”
Harris said she owns an English bull terrier and an American bulldog, and has taught them not to jump on people.
While dog owners might think their loose animals wouldn’t cause harm, they needed to remember the injured and vulnerable, Harris said.
What if it ”were an elderly lady" that the dog jumped on, she asked.
Harris said her trauma doctor from 2016 had visited her and said her old injuries wouldn’t have caused her bowels to knot.
She had been regaining her health over the past three years and starting to walk again in public.
She said that on the day the dog jumped at her, she had gone out for one of her first coffees and beach walks since the accident.
It was another painful setback coming through no fault of her own.
In 2017, the Herald visited Harris along with Dr Marcus Chan – the man who had saved her life aboard an Auckland Rescue Helicopter.
Harris said at the time that she had been driving over the Dome Valley Hill near Warkworth in north Auckland in 2016.
She recalled seeing a van overtaking the cars in front of him and heading straight for her.
She wondered whether to speed up or brake but realised she could not avoid the crash.
She let go of the steering wheel, flinging her arm up to protect her face.
“I remember watching my hand ... fly across off [the] steering wheel and literally snap off my wrist in front of my face.”
Chan said Harris’ crash injuries were “immediately life-threatening”.
She had no blood pressure and was screaming from the pain.
The rescuers cut off the top of her car and moved the engine off her leg.
Without Chan and the Auckland Rescue Helicopter arriving quickly, she likely would have bled to death.
The helicopter was the only one at the time to carry emergency trauma doctors on board, and that meant Chan was able to give her lifesaving blood transfusions.
She woke a month later in hospital having been in an induced coma.
Her body was riddled with broken bones and she had suffered serious internal injuries, including lacerations to her lungs and liver.
Her baby – who was at 34 weeks’ gestation – did not survive.
Harris said in 2017 she considered herself lucky, given she had been told that nine out of 10 people died from the types of injuries she suffered.
Nevertheless, she’s frustrated to be seriously injured again.
It has cost her a long-planned trip to Great Barrier Island and yet more time in already hard-fought recovery.
“I would just not want my dog to cause this type of injury to anybody.”
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