A Connecticut artist had her nose bitten off by her boyfriend’s pit bull mix rescue when the pooch got spooked by her teeth-whitening device.
Olivia Quast, 30, from Thomaston, suffered horrific injuries to her face and arm during the Feb. 3 incident involving her boyfriend Graeme Stasyshyn’s 6-year-old dog, Bentley, which he’s had for four years.
Quast recalled in an interview with Kennedy News and Media reported by The Independent that she touched her face and was shocked that her nose “wasn’t there.”
Quast said the dog then continued attacking her, leaving her left arm mangled before she could fight the animal off and call for help.
Quast speculated that Bentley, who was abused as a puppy, might have been startled and provoked by her teeth-whitening mouth guard equipped with a UV light.
In a separate interview, the woman said the dog’s eyes “changed” and described the animal as “dissociated.”
The artist said of herself that she used to be a “cat person” who never liked dogs until she moved in with her 44-year-old boyfriend and his pointer, pitbull and bulldog mix, which became the first dog she “ever loved.”
Quast stressed that she had a good relationship with Bentley and would snuggle with the pooch in her bed, so when the canine attacked her last month, it came as a “total shock.”
“He lunged, and he got my nose first, I was in shock and disbelief,” the woman recalled. “I just stared at him. It never dawned on me that he was going to keep attacking me, because why would he? I put my hand on my nose and he lunged at my arm twice more.”
Quast said she made a conscious decision to not try to yank her arm out of the dog’s jaws because she knew Bentley’s “favorite game is tug of war,” so she let the pet bite her until she kicked it in the side, causing Bentley to scamper off.
Quast then made a frantic phone call to her mother.
“I was in pure agony. [I was saying] ‘help me mom, help me, he took my nose. My fingers are going numb, I can’t feel my fingers, I’m getting cold,’” she recalled saying. “It was terrifying.”
The woman then raced to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror to survey the damage from the attack.
“I stayed standing but I felt my entire being drop to the floor, the room spun, it’s like everything was in hyper-focus and spinning and it was pure agony,” Quast said.
The victim was taken by ambulance to Hartford Hospital, where doctors found that her nose, septum and cartilage had been ripped out, but the bridge of her nose and her nostrils remained intact.
The physical injuries did not impact her breathing and sense of smell.
Quast’s left arm was also badly injured, requiring surgery to install two plates, eight screws and two pins to hold the limb together.
The mauling additionally caused damage to nerves and ligaments in the woman’s hand, which will take a year to heal.
The 30-year-old is now waiting for her facial injuries to fully heal before undergoing reconstructive surgery to create a new nose using cartilage from her ear, pieces of her ribs and skin from her forehead.
Quast’s condition is further complicated by the fact that she suffers from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome – a rare connective tissue disorder that she was diagnosed with at six months old, and which makes her susceptible to bruises and injuries.
As a result of the illness, the woman dislocates her joints on a daily basis, has received stitches more than 80 times and lives with chronic pain.
In the wake of the brutal attack, Quast and her boyfriend had Bentley humanely euthanized, after treating the dog to a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich and letting it play with stuffed animals while listening to classical music, reported The Middletown Press.
Quast’s best friend has launched a GoFundMe campaign to help the woman with her mounting medical expenses. The fundraiser has drawn more than $66,000 in donations so far.
In a YouTube video posted on the platform on March 1, Quast, with a bandage covering the remnants of her nose, expressed her gratitude to the donors and well-wishers, saying: “I’m grateful that I’m OK.”
