Mom Who Lost Her Arms in Dog Attack Finally Gets Some Good News

After seven weeks in a hospital, Kyleen Waltman is finally home.

The South Carolina mom sustained horrific injuries on March 21 when three dogs mauled her as she was out walking. Doctors had to amputate both her arms and remove her colon, and she may lose a leg if grafts aren’t successful. Her shoulder bones had to be removed which means she may not be able to get prosthetic arms. She also had skin tears and bites from her head to her feet, and has suffered a range of setbacks during her long stay in a hospital.

“It was just one of the most gruesome animal attacks that I’ve ever seen in my career,” Lieutenant Jeffrey Hines of the Abbeville County Sheriff’s Office testified at a court hearing last month for the dog owner, Justin Minor, who is accused of multiple violations of animal-control laws.

The seven weeks in a hospital were agonizing for Waltman, who was so traumatized when she first realized she’d lost her arms that she had to be sedated again.

Owner Whose Dogs Mauled Mom Now Tied to Previous Dog Attack

In a Tuesday update on a GoFundMe page, Waltman’s sister, Amy Wynne, revealed the good news that Waltman had finally returned to her mom’s house—but she said it had presented a range of new challenges.

“It has been rough and we’ve been trying to get her settled into her new life,” Wynne wrote. “She is a talker, lol... She is running our poor mama raged [sic] as the least.”

Waltman is undergoing outpatient surgeries, including having her shoulder re-grafted and getting grafts to prevent her from losing her leg. “[The leg] is healing but they have to pull her muscle up from her calf and see if that is gonna work. They did graft around the [wound] to see if it’ll take and it did,” Wynne wrote.

She said Waltman’s doctors didn’t want to perform both procedures together so they did a three-hour operation on her shoulder first, and will do the nine-hour operation on her leg at a later date.

“She’s coming back home after recovery. It’s hard on the family at the moment because we have no outside help, she has been denied for Medicaid and disability. So we have to do it all for her.”

The family has raised more than $260,000 for her recovery.

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