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When the bear tackled her, Lee Ann Galante’s face cracked against a cement slab in her backyard.

“I’m screaming and screaming and screaming — ‘Someone help me!’”

It was one of two or three times a black bear knocked her down during an attack Tuesday night behind her Butler Township home.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to die — she’s going to kill me,’” Galante said.

Galante, 55, spoke with TribLive on Thursday about the terrifying attack as she recovered in her hospital room at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh’s North Side.

“She was huge. I could just hear her like huffing and stuff, but it was just all such a blur,” she said. “It just happened so fast.”

Bruised and battered, Galante said she is determined to make a scheduled trip to Italy in a month. She has never traveled overseas.

First, she will need facial reconstruction surgery

“I hope this doesn’t ruin my trip to Italy,” she said. “I’m going to go to Italy if it kills me. I’ll be still bruised up.”

The attack

It started with her dog, Smokie.

Galante’s husband was out Tuesday evening, and she opened the back door to let Smokie outside before bed.

The dog quickly started barking.

“I heard this terrible commotion at the bird feeders,” Galante said. “I see the silhouettes of three bear cubs.”

They were in her neighbor’s tree, she said.

All of a sudden, the mother black bear came “out of the darkness,” hopped the fence surrounding their deck and started chasing after Smokie, a small, black Pomeranian.

Galante ran outside and called for Smokie.

“I’m thinking, ‘I cannot let my dog get eaten by this bear,’” she said.

The bear noticed.

“She comes after me. She knocks me down,” Galante said.

When Galante first hit the ground, she heard a loud crunch.

“Not my teeth,” she thought.

Galante works as a dental hygienist.

The bear then took the back of Galante’s head and started pulling on her hair.

“Oh my gosh,” Galante thought. “She’s going to scalp me with her teeth.”

At some point, the bear bit Galane’s upper left arm.

“She comes after me again … she’s on top of me,” she said.

At some point, the bear became distracted and moved. Smokie ran onto the deck. Galante started crawling toward the back door.

“She was ready to charge again,” Galante said. “We got in the house, and I crawled through the kitchen.

She said she doesn’t know how the bear got distracted but considers it a miracle.

“If we wouldn’t have gotten in the house when we did, she would’ve killed both of us for sure,” Galante said. “I’m thankful to be alive. Thank God.”

Galante called 911.

“As I’m in the kitchen on the floor calling 911, I’m thinking, ‘I don’t wanna know what the back of my head looks like because I thought there would be nothing left to it,’” she recalled.

A police officer happened to be nearby and responded. Galante remembers crawling to the front door to let him in.

“I’m bleeding everywhere,” she said. “There was just so much blood.”

Smokie had run upstairs to hide.

Galante hasn’t gotten a chance to see Smokie since the attack. She’s been in the hospital since Tuesday night but was set to be discharged Thursday afternoon.

Galante suffered a broken nose and other broken facial bones, received several staples in the back of her head, and has bite marks in her arm, stitches in her upper lip, a cut behind her ear, and numerous scratches and bruises. She is sore and swollen, she said, and her sinuses and cheekbones were affected as well.

“Her whole mouth was around my arm,” she said.

Still, she said, “I’m lucky … it could’ve been much worse.”

Though she was initially transported to a hospital in Butler, she was taken to AGH. She will return next week for surgery.

Bear sightings

This hasn’t been the first time black bears have been spotted in Galante’s neighborhood.

About two weeks ago, they had gotten into her bird feeder, and neighbors had bears on their Ring camera footage.

One neighbor had footage of all four bears, she said.

In 2009, a bear took down their feeder, Galante said.

The three bear cubs in the tree “seemed huge,” she said.

Travis Lau, the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s director of communications, the three young bears are yearlings as opposed to newborn cubs. They initially were tranquilized and later released in Warren.

Game Commission personnel killed the mother bear when they said it again became aggressive toward officers at the scene.

Black bear attacks on humans in Pennsylvania are rare, but Tuesday’s incident is at least the third in the state in the past year.

Dr. Allan Philp, trauma medical director for Allegheny Health Network, treated Galante at AGH. He said he received a page that said “bear attack.” He stopped to take a photo of the page because it was rare.

He said the first objective was to get Galante to the hospital as quickly as possible.

“Thankfully, she was stable from a vital sign perspective,” Philp said. “It was pretty obvious she had injuries to her face and head.”

Facial surgeons will want swelling to go down to get the best cosmetic reconstruction, he said. Galante’s injuries fortunately weren’t affecting her neck or eyes, he said.

“Predator animals will intentionally attack a neck because that’s where the blood vessels are,” Philp said.

Philp has been working with trauma for 23 years, and this is only the second or third bear attack he has seen. The others were hunting related.

“The ones I’ve seen have not been someone minding their own business in their yard,” he said.

Galante said she’s thankful Smokie is alive. Her son took the dog to the vet to have him checked out. He only had a little claw mark, she said.

She appreciates all the people who reached out and offered help.

“I always thought black bears were more afraid of us,” Galante said. “I always thought they were kind of mild-mannered around here.”

Philp noted how much bigger bears are than people — and how much more fit for combat.

And Galante?

“She was remarkably stoic,” Philp said. “She’s a really tough lady to have kept her wits about her.”