I tripped over my dog jogging — now my face is falling off

A freak accident left a Delaware woman with portions of her face “falling off” after taking a nasty spill while on a jog with her dog.

Shelley Puchalsky, 39, tripped over the Shih Tzu, Chloe, and plummeted face forward on a trail, suffering multiple major lacerations to her nose and forehead.

Although it happened in September 2019, complications from the hellish wound have been a living, recurring nightmare for Puchalsky, who now lives in St. Pete Beach, Florida, for insurance reasons.

“I had to get [40] stitches, and they became infected and wouldn’t heal. I went to a doctor who said he could help me, so he did a skin graft over my nose and restitched my forehead,” Puchalsky told Kennedy News and Media.

“It was a botched surgery. In hindsight, I don’t think they realized it was infected when they put the skin graft over it, and by the time I went back and let them know, I wasn’t taken seriously.”

Things only took a turn for the worse from there as the infection left the mom of two’s skin “just falling off the bone.”

“It was terrible,” she said. “It had eaten through my skin down to the bone. There was a huge mango-sized hole in my forehead that just kept getting bigger, and you could actually see down to the bone. “

Just more than a year later, Puchalsky was diagnosed with bone inflammation, called osteomyelitis, inside her skull. Subsequently, she found out she was battling sepsis at the time.

“There was a spot on my nose with no skin on it,” Puchalsky added. “The skin on my forehead was all the way gone, [then] it started going up into my scalp and moving [my] hair — just chunks of skin and hair.”

She opted for a major surgery in February 2021, in which she had to be cut from “ear to ear” to remove the infection and rework her skin grafts.

Although the invasive surgery was successful overall, the procedure had complications and became reinfected.

Since moving to Florida in November 2022, Puchalsky, now pursuing a Ph.D. in education, has been under the care of a specialist as she continues fund-raising for a reconstructive procedure that would help mitigate the years of damage and deterioration.

“I probably didn’t go out in public for two years, I still don’t go out much, every now and then. I try to time it really early in the morning or late at night,” she said. “I don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror. I don’t look in the mirror a lot, I feel like the person looking back isn’t me.”

The goal is for Puchalsky — who has only been seen by close friends — to have the operation fully completed before she weds her boyfriend, real estate developer David Miller, 59, in December.

Initially, two reality TV shows offered to fund the surgery, but ultimately “backed out,” according to her GoFundMe.

No matter what happens though, Puchalsky — who is in therapy — knows she has “a great support system” and that “the scars will heal over time.”

“I feel lucky to be alive: I’ve seen other stories of people who’ve had sepsis who’ve had it much worse off than me with missing limbs, and I feel lucky to have walked away with what I have.”