A disabled elderly woman had to be taken to hospital after a rat viciously attacked her face while she slept. On 9 May, Diana Kirk was found in bed “with blood everywhere” by her husband John at 5:45 am. The 76-year-old has brain damage and sleeps downstairs in a hospital bed, according to The Mirror.

She is looked after by her 85-year-old partner along with a care team who visit their home Bingham to provide assistance. Kirk’s husband was asleep upstairs when he heard something “scratching around” by his feet, he told the Nottingham Post.

John further explained that he could not see the animal very clearly in the darkness but that it was definitely a large rodent. Around 1:30 am, he noticed it again but then fell asleep and woke up as usual before 6 am.

He then went downstairs to check on his wife in their living room and saw what had happened before calling the ambulance straight away. It arrived just before 8:30 am. Since the terrible news made headlines in the UK, pictures have been shared with John Kirk’s permission, revealing the extent of his wife’s horrific injuries.

“I’ve never seen anything like the injuries she had—you can see how bad they were from the pictures,” he told the Nottingham Post, continuing, “It was absolutely savage. 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.”

“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.”

The following morning, a neighbour set up a trap in the house, and Kirk said the rat was caught and trapped in a cage. As he tried to move it to the patio, he said the creature attempted to bite him several times before his neighbour came to help—managing to kill the rat by shooting it four times with a pellet gun.

Kirk added, “Because of her condition, my wife can’t move. 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.”