Korinne Mortensen of Salt Lake City, Utah, was relaxing with her dog Niko in November 2022 when he suddenly lunged at her and mauled her face.
Before the incident, he had been ‘the perfect dog in the world’ for four years, leaving Mrs Mortensen with a gaping bloody hole on the bridge of her nose.
It was only after the attack that the Mortensens learned that their beloved pet had a serious and aggressive form of cancer in his brain.
They believe the tumor is responsible for the drastic personality change.
Korinne is shown with her dogs, including Niko on the left. The Mortenses had Niko euthanized in January 2023 after learning he had a terminal brain tumor
Korinne, pictured, suffered a serious injury after her dog Niko fell on her face, breaking her nose and removing a piece of skin
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The family felt they had no choice but to humanely euthanize Niko because they wanted to both spare him the pain and protect their children.
Ms Mortensen, 30, does not blame her dog for the incident.
The dog that attacked her, she said, was not the same dog they adopted years ago.
The cancer had hijacked his personality.
Tumors in the forebrain of dogs are known to cause abnormalities in their behavior, even becoming more aggressive.
The forebrain is responsible for ‘thinking’, behavior and the ultimate integration of sensory information.
Tumors in the forebrain can therefore cause dogs to become irritable, confused and aggressive.
After Niko punched her face, Mrs. Mortensen did not immediately understand what had happened in those short few seconds.
She went to the bathroom and saw that her face was covered in blood. The pain had not yet set in.
Mrs Mortensen said: ‘It was half a second. It was so quick and one bite. It all happened so quickly and I was in shock because I never thought my sweet dog would do this.”
When she arrived at the hospital, she started feeling the throbbing, stabbing pain. Her nose was completely broken in half and a hole the size of a quarter was torn out of the bridge.
She said: ‘I was worried about whether my face would get messed up in the long term and what we would do with our dog afterwards.
‘During the operation he re-broke my entire nose and reconstructed it so that it was functional and also filled the large hole.
‘He applied a zigzag layer of skin to cover up the scars. My surgeon told me at my check-up that he said he had to saw (my nose) back together.”
Before the attack, Niko suffered from epileptic fits. The family had an appointment to take him to the vet in the coming weeks.
Since Niko had never been violent before, the Mortensens were not afraid to go to the doctor sooner.
In the year after the freak attack, Ms Mortensen struggled to look at herself in the mirror. She feared she would never look like herself again.
And she wasn’t sure how Niko would fit into her growing family.
She had just given birth to her second son in September 2023, a month before he lunged at her face.
She said: ‘He then started getting aggressive towards our other dog and we had to have him in a muzzle 24/7 and we felt so bad about this.
‘As quickly as he went downhill, there wasn’t much they could do for him, so we decided to put him down as it was the best option as it wasn’t fair to him.’
Since undergoing emergency surgery in November last year, Ms Mortensen has had two rounds of injectable fillers injected into her nose to restore its normal shape.
Since having surgery to repair her nose, Ms Mortensen has had two fillings to restore the shape of her nose
Ms Mortensen has come to terms with the fact that her nose will never look exactly as it did before the attack, but since operations and fillers she has more self-confidence.
She said: ‘There are still scars and I will always have them, but the structural integrity now looks like a normal nose.
‘I now go out with confidence and it’s not the first thing people notice when they talk to me.’
The Mortensens have since made peace with the event and have fond memories of their time with Niko before his unusually ferocious behavior.
She added: “I don’t blame our dog for the attack at all. Come to think of it, it wasn’t our dog that did this.
“We have closed it and can now remember the good memories and the four years we had the perfect dog.”
