Leggett: In hindsight, trying to hold on to that Great Pyrenees maybe wasn't my best idea

Our dog corrected my vision last week.

To be perfectly honest, she did much more damage than she fixed, but still my right-eye vision is better than it was. I would gladly have returned to the old way of seeing, but after she bounced me around the sidewalk for 10 to 15 feet, there was no going back.

It happened like this: Rana and I had to be out of town for a few days for medical things, and so we thought it best to board our three dogs. We were worried about the heat and didn’t want them to suffer.

We went back to pick them up Saturday afternoon, and that’s when the wreck took place. I had already put our springer spaniel and miniature schnauzer mix in the car, where Rana was waiting in the air conditioning. Ann Oliver, who was boarding our dogs, brought Rana’s 13-month-old Great Pyrenees to the gate into the yard, and I took the leash form her.

This is when the train jumped the tracks.

I took the leash and turned toward the car when Katmai saw Rana in the car and decided that she wanted to be with her mother. She took off running with me trying to slow her down. It didn’t work.

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That dog is still a puppy, but she’s huge, more than 80 pounds and over 5 feet tall when she stands upright. I was running to catch up with her, but I couldn’t do it, and being the hardheaded dummy I am, didn’t have the presence of mind to just release the leash.

After maybe 5 yards of that futile effort, I lost my balance and went down on the sidewalk. Both knees were the first things that hit the surface, followed quickly by my face. Flat on the concrete, where my head bounced slightly and came to a rest.

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I fell with my back against the side of the house, blood pouring from my nose and mouth. I was kind of in shock, and the pain was significant. I stuck my tongue through my bottom lip, which was sliced down the middle by my front teeth.

I was leaning against the house and trying to assess my injuries when Rana came up and said we needed an ambulance. “I’m fine,” I said repeatedly, but she pointed out that I was taking blood thinners and needed to make sure I hadn’t knocked something loose inside my cranium.

When the medics arrived in the ambulance, they started asking me questions and said I needed to get up and onto the stretcher and get to a hospital to be checked out. Wisely, I decided to give in on that, and so we loaded up for a trip to Ascension Seton Medical Center Williamson in Round Rock, where I could be scanned and X-rayed and properly checked out by a doctor.

The people at the hospital were wonderful and attentive, even when I couldn’t get any words out that didn’t sound as if I were talking through a wet towel. They cleaned me up and sent me out into the world. The damage:

· My nose broken in three places.

∙ A concussion.

· My lip split through and stitched up.

· A cut on the end of my right little finger that required stitches.

· My right eye swollen shut and a blood pocket above that.

· Both knees torn up from the rapid stop, one of them much worse than the other.

· Various bruises on my arms and chest and a black eye.

· Teeth so sore I couldn’t eat for a week.

I survived on ice cream and Campbell’s chicken soup for six days and finally felt I could chew something. I had a scrambled egg and an English muffin.

The vision repair came about when I banged my face off the sidewalk and bounced my eyeballs around inside my noggin.

I had radial keratotomy 30 years ago, and the doctor left my right eye slightly undercorrected. My left eye was fine. I had good vision for three decades, but when I was able to see out of my right eye I noticed that things looked brighter and more in focus than they had been.

It’s still OK, so I’m counting it a victory, but my teeth still hurt. And I have to go back and pick up that dog again.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Outdoors writer Mike Leggett still recovering from hard fall, injuries