An 81-year-old man was stabbed several times as he fought a house robber who broke into his Glenwood home on Thursday morning.

Kennith Sara was woken by his growling dog, which sleeps on the bed with him and his wife.

Thinking the dog wanted to go outside; the octogenarian opened the door and started making his way down the stairs to the ground floor of his home when he was attacked by a man armed with a knife.

“Out of nowhere this guy ran at me with a knife and we fought and I had to protect myself on the stairs. All I wanted to do was stop him from going upstairs to my wife and I was just trying to focus on keeping the knife away from me,” he said.

Sara said that in the melee he was either stabbed in the head or fell on to the stairs.

“I was bleeding like a stuck pig. We had a big fight and I was bleeding everywhere, not sure if I was stabbed or hit my head,” he said.

“Another robber ran around us and went into the bedroom. My wife had heard me shouting and he pushed her back into the bedroom and demanded our money and cellphones,” Sara said.

He said the robbers had climbed up nearly 3m over a railing, before using a screwdriver to prise open a window.

“We arrived to find the elderly gentleman had sustained serious head trauma and wounds to his arm. We stabilised him there before taking him to a nearby hospital by ambulance,” said RescueCare spokesperson Garrith Jamieson.