Ryder Wells was 21 months old on the day after Thanksgiving in 2015 when a visit to a family friend’s home in Raleigh, North Carolina, ended in catastrophe. He slipped outside through a pet door. Two Rottweilers attacked him in the yard. His mother, Brittany Wells, found him face-down on the grass. When they turned him over, she said, his face was gone.

The injuries were catastrophic. Ryder lost his right cheek, the lower part of an eyelid and about 75 percent of his lip. His teeth were crushed. His arm was broken. A lung was punctured. He was flown to hospital and taken into a marathon emergency operation — reported as about 14 hours — while surgeons tried to save his life and what they could of his face. He needed a tracheostomy. Doctors feared the bites had gone so deep that he might be paralysed. He was not. He lived. Then the long reconstruction began.

Over the following years he underwent dozens of procedures — news reports in 2020 put the count near 50 — including skin grafts that sometimes failed because there was so little healthy tissue left to attach them to. He had to relearn how to drink and eat. Surgeons said he might never eat normally. He refused a purée diet, adapted, and ate ordinary food with the teeth he had left. Reconstruction of his nose, eyelids and dental work was expected to continue as he grew.

The operating theatre was only part of the recovery. Strangers stared. A child in a park pointed and shouted “monster.” Someone in a shop said “ew.” Adults looked too long. Brittany, a teaching assistant, said it broke her heart that after everything he had survived, people were cruel about something he could not help. She told him every day that he was beautiful, that different is beautiful, and that being different does not make him less of a person. He sometimes hid behind glasses and a cap. He also looked in the mirror and, she said, did not see a different little boy — just himself.

Ryder’s story is not only a trauma case. It is a mother’s public argument: scars are evidence of survival, not a licence for strangers to be unkind. Courage and character are what remain after the grafts, the stares and the next scheduled operation.

Sources
The Sun, 16 July 2020: mother Brittany Wells on the attack, surgeries and public comments.
CBS 17 / WNCN, 7 November 2017: recovery after the 2015 Raleigh Rottweiler attack.
Lake Norman Publications, 2016: early hospital course and family account.
7NEWS / Daily Mail syndication of the 2020 interviews.