Last week was a bit disturbing for me at work. Besides learning that one of my kids was heading to Guatemala with his family because they had to flee and not getting a chance to say goodbye to him, I also learned something disturbing about one of the other kids at the library.

She used to come to the library every day after school and hang out before she had to go to work at one of the local fast food joints. She is a great kid. We sorta bonded because she used to live in the town I now live in so we used to talk a lot in the afternoon. She really is a great kid, too.

Well, she stopped coming a few weeks ago. I assumed it was due to the nice weather. At about that time, there were stories in the paper about a local teen who was attacked by the family dog. It was a pretty bad attack. The dog went after her arm and face and even bit off about half of her upper lip, which they had been unable to reattach.

I never put 2 and 2 together, but last week she came in. She looked like she had tripped and scraped up one side of her face. Of course, I didn't say anything because you just don't do that with teens because they are sensitive about their appearance.

After talking for a little while she asked me if I heard what had happened to her. I told her know, and she highlighted that she was the girl that had been int he paper. I felt so bad that I had not realized it. I told her that I never would have guessed that because she was healing so well. She has never been one of the teens who was overly worried about her appearance so that probably helped, but I was still inspired by her positive outlook. With that said, I was surprised how well they were able to masked what happened. For the missing portion of lip, they curled the edge of the mouth in that area just a bit, and it looked like so much like it orinally did that I assumed that it had been reattached and healed well.

She was very forward-looking. She said the toughest thing that she still had some numb spots on her cheek and arm that still bothered her.

I told her that she really was an inspiration because she had so much self-confidence and was taking everything so well. If only all teenagers were so comfortable.