Amaya Hess will start kindergarten in the fall with 48 surgeries under her belt. The medication she takes is so powerful that her mother must check her blood pressure every day. And when the 4-year-old got a pair of earrings for Christmas, she had to stash one in a drawer.

Two and a half years ago, a pit bull bit off the right side of Amaya's face. She was with her mother, Bobbie Tomlin, on the way to a Near-Westside park when a man asked Tomlin for a cigarette, and she stopped to give him one. As the man -- Michael Hamilton, 24 -- went back into his house, his uncle's pit bull slipped out the door and lunged for Amaya, clamping his jaw around the toddler's head.

Tomlin, grabbed Amaya's feet, and for six harrowing minutes, "we were doing tug of war," said Tomlin, now 23.

When Hamilton finally pried the dog's jaws open with a hammer, Tomlin could see her daughter's skull. The pit bull had torn off her ear and pushed one eye so far back into her head that firefighters later looked for it in the yard. The dog had ripped Amaya's hair from her head.

"It looked like a toupee lying on the ground," Tomlin said.

A passing truck driver gave Amaya mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until emergency workers arrived. She spent three months in a coma.

Animal Care and Control euthanized Ozzie and another dog found at the Hamilton home.

In civil court, a judge banned both the uncle, 47-year-old Mark Hamilton, and Michael Hamilton from ever owning an animal. Michael Hamilton had to pay $550 and Mark Hamilton $1,000 in penalties for owner responsibility for animal attack and other violations.

A Marion County court judge tacked on six months of home detention for Mark Hamilton, who pleaded guilty in criminal court to not vaccinating his dog.

Efforts to contact both men were unsuccessful.

A vivacious child, Amaya has made a tremendous recovery. She started special education preschool at age 3 with the developmental capacity of an 18-month-old, Tomlin said. Now she is on track to start mainstream kindergarten in the fall.

But her mom knows she'll feel different from other kids. She has hearing loss in one ear, only peripheral vision in one eye, and scars across her scalp and the right side of her face.

"The question that everyone asks me," Tomlin said, "is 'how was she burned?' Well, she wasn't burned. She was attacked by a dog."