I WAS ONLY a child when I faced death for the first time.

Aged just two years and four months old, I was savaged by my father’s doberman pinscher in the back garden of our home in the Artarmon veterinary hospital. I was tossed like a rag doll, my ear was torn from my head and the dog’s fangs penetrated straight through the thin bone of my skull and into the brain. My left eye was missed by a fraction of a millimetre.