An elderly woman has been taken to hospital after being attacked by a rat while she slept at home. Diana Kirk, 76, was found with horrendous injuries to her face and body by her husband at 5.45am on Monday, May 9. Diana's husband, John Kirk, has spoken out about what happened to his wife and shared the graphic images in the hopes of warning others to be vigilant to rodents.
Mrs Kirk has brain damage so sleeps downstairs in the couple's home in Bingham, near Nottingham, on a hospital bed and is cared for by her husband John, aged 85, and a team of carers who regularly come by the couple's home to help them out. Mr Kirk says he was asleep upstairs when he heard a rat "scratching around" at his feet late at night, NottinghamshireLive reported .
Later, at around 1.30am, he heard the scratching sound again before he fell asleep again and woke up shortly before 6am, the time he usually wakes up. Sadly, when he went downstairs to see his wife, he found her caked in blood, with her face and neck covered in claw and bite marks.
Mrs Kirk's eyelids, fingers and elbow had been gnawed by the huge 9-inch rodent, which had been nesting in a sideboard in their home where the couple kept birdseed.
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"When I was in the army the fella in the next bed shot his brains out with a revolver but the mess that caused wasn’t as bad as this! At first I thought Diana had been shot," devastated Mr Kirk told SWNS. "There was blood everywhere. The rat had tried to eat her to get to her blood. There were bite marks on her cheek and her lips. Diana's fingers and elbow were badly chewed as well.
"It was like a scene from Rambo. Absolutely horrific. She was just shaking with her hands by her neck staring up at me."
"I've never seen anything like the injuries she had - you can see how bad they were from the pictures. It was absolutely savage," he added. "I went and knocked on the door of the young girl over the road as she is also always up early and so she helped."
They took Diana to the Queen's Medical Centre and she came back on Thursday night.
He continued: "There were scratches on her face, her neck, her hands - it had tried to gnaw right through to the bone from the looks of it. There was blood everywhere."
After Mrs Kirk was taken to hospital, a neighbour helped Mr Kirk set up a rat trap in the home. Mr Kirk says the rat has been caught and trapped in the cage and was moved to the patio - before it tried to bite him several times.
A neighbour then killed the rat, shooting it four times with a pellet gun.
"Because of her condition, my wife can't move," Mr Kirk added. "I have since read that rats only ever go for young babies and people who are immobile in bed like my wife. She can't feel pain so she would not have known much about what happened. I would like people to know what can happen and to be aware of it. I found out a couple of days after it happened that it was making a nest in the house."
Helen Speed, the care manager at Home Instead East Notts and Melton Mowbray, a care agency which supports Mr and Mrs Kirk, said: "A few weeks ago another one of our caregivers was in Bingham and heard some squealing - there was a rat inside a client's dustbin. I think it must be an ongoing issue and one that I think people living nearby need to be aware of - especially if they are vulnerable."
