ratbones

Two weeks ago I was trying to sleep on a hot, muggy summer night. I have a window AC unit in my bedroom now. It's the first time I've had AC since my college apartment -- it turns out these things are pretty cheap if you have a small room; why didn't I get one sooner? -- so summertime sleep has generally been better this year, but on that night, I woke up around 4:45 AM and couldn't get back to sleep. Over the sound of the AC, I kept hearing this little scratching and tapping noise. A mouse in the wall, I thought. You may recall I have experience with mice. I slapped the wall above the bed to try and scare it off, but it just kept tapping intermittently.

It started to seem weirdly rhythmic. Just plain weird. I reached out and slapped the lamp next to my bed, but I didn't see anything on the wall. Turned the light out. Tried to sleep. Tap, scritch, scritch, tap. Crazymaking. I turned the lamp on and rolled over onto my back.

Over my bed, a bat was flying frantic loops around the room, running into the leaf garland hung up in the corner on almost every pass.

The mouse-on-my-head situation really did not faze me. I thought it was funny. This? Not funny. Bats are cute, but not in my house, not with their high rabies burden, not around my cats even though the lads are vaccinated. I've had bats in the house before, and I sort of know what to do, but I'm not a fan. On one particularly alarming evening after a power outage a few years ago, I had to remove six of them. It's an old farmhouse, and there was a broken window in the attic, and bats just lived up there and sometimes accidentally ended up down here.

That was supposed to have been fixed, though. I put up with a worker repairing and sealing my attic and roof for weeks over the winter. It was a colossal pain in my ass and destroyed my ability to focus on anything for the entire time, but at least, at least, my house was going to be certifiably bat-proof. A one-way bat funnel was installed when every other hole was sealed, so any bats in the attic in January (when there shouldn't be any anyway) could leave but couldn't return. A misery, but bat problem solved.

Ha! Sure. The animals are out to get me, guys. I love animals, but they love me so much they won't leave me alone.

I'm pissed at the bat-proofing guy, but that's a long-term sort of issue. In the short term, there I was, with a bat circling my dimly-lit bedroom. Naked under the sheet, if you must know. The situation was thus, and it had to be met in the moment. I huddled in fear for several seconds as I worked out a game plan that didn't involve huddling there for the rest of my life or until the bat simply died.

Eventually I bailed, dashing out of the room and shutting the door behind me. I scooped up the cats, one under each arm, interrupting their perfectly pleasant sleep as the bat had interrupted mine, and dropped them into the kitchen, putting another door between them and the critter. Then I threw on my work clothes and leather work gloves. I didn't want a rabies exposure.

I did battle with that bat for a good twenty minutes. By the time I got back upstairs, it had found the tiny gap at the top of my bedroom door and was flying around the house at will, just as alarmed as I was by this situation. I scuttled past, throwing open windows and screens, staying low and out of its flight path while trying to keep an eye on it so I'd know if it left. It made a few attempts at a window, but kept missing and bouncing off of the window frame. It found an inch-high gap above the door but couldn't figure out a wide-open window.

It found its way downstairs, but would not simply exit through the front door like a decent guest, too bewildered by the lights to do anything but drunkenly orbit the ceiling fan. Then it decided it liked upstairs better, so it made an attempt to return. However, bats do not know how stairs work, and it flew directly into a riser and splatted onto a step.

Now, again, I have bat-expulsion experience, and I knew that thing wasn't getting up. It wasn't injured, but there was nowhere that it could climb to from which it could take off. I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a bowl and a file folder left over from tax season while my cats stared at me, wondering if I'd finally cracked. The bowl went over the screaming bat and the folder went under it, and the bat went outside into the predawn shadows, where I watched it scurry to the edge of my porch, drop off, and fly away. There. Done. Go eat mosquitoes and be useful, you shrilling little shit.

While I was shaking down all the curtains in the house to make sure there wasn't a second bat (trauma response), I remembered a thing. "Sleeping in the same room with a bat is considered a rabies exposure."

Keep the bat. You're supposed to keep the bat. Then the bat can be rabies tested, and if it's clear, which it probably is, you have nothing to worry about. But, look, when it is 5 AM and there's a wild animal flying around in your house, the last thing on your mind is keeping it. You want rid of the bat. For the period of time in which the bat is there, never seeing that bat again is the only thing you have ever wanted. I certainly wished no harm on the bat, I just wanted it the hell out of my house. No, I didn't keep the bat. It looked healthy -- incredibly vigorous, actually -- but I couldn't confirm it didn't have rabies.

But the bat didn't bite me. Surely. I am a healthy young adult, and bad at sleeping on top of that. If the bat bit me, or even touched me, I would know, surely.

An hour of nail-biting and googling later, I was convinced that I might, in fact, not know. Of course, there was a single-digit probability the bat had rabies, and I suppose an even lower probability that it had made contact. But I had to ask myself what risk of contracting rabies I was comfortable with. Like, risking death is one thing. Risking death from rabies is another.

Later in the morning, after sleeping almost not at all, I called the health department, hoping irrationally that they'd ask me if I had any kind of illness or disability that would prevent me from noticing an entire animal landing on my in my sleep, and I'd say no, not at all, and they'd say, oh, then you're fine, actually. They did not say that. They said, you should have kept the bat. And I said, fuck, man, I know, don't remind me. And they said, go to the emergency room. And I said, seriously? The ER? For probably literally nothing? And they said, only the ER has post-exposure prophylaxis; your GP or urgent care won't have it. So I called the GP and urgent care and they told me to go ~~fuck myself~~ to the ER.

If you go to the ER with probably nothing wrong with you, you do end up waiting for five hours. They ask you when you come in whether you have thoughts of harming yourself or others, and you laugh a little when you say no, because that's just silly! Look at you, you are so normal. But by the end of those five hours, you have the thoughts. They don't ask you again at that point because they know you have the fucking thoughts. "If you don't inject me RIGHT NOW, I will kill you and then myself, because I've now spent as many hours sitting here waiting as I spent sleeping last night and nobody even came to bring me a bag of chips," you think, but you don't say that, because being nice is the most efficient way to get some shots and get the hell home. You also drive home shaking with some kind of weird exhausted nervous energy release when you probably should've gone to McDonald's and sat for a while until you stopped shaking, but you wanted to get home so badly you weren't thinking straight, which is why you shouldn't have been driving. But you don't wreck your car, thank fuck, because a second emergency room visit today would kill you.

Anyway, I'm vaccinated for rabies now, so for some scientifically uncertain period of time, I can wrestle rabid animals with no consequences to my health. To be honest, given the lifestyle I lead, I'm glad I managed to get vaccinated in a way I can justify to my insurance. And I did realize I could have lied about this at any time and gotten the shots, but, look, it's very annoying, and I wouldn't have bothered if I didn't think my life was a little bit on the line. So.

(In case anyone ever has a rabies exposure and is scared, the shots don't hurt. I mean, they do hurt, but like, the same as a flu shot. Maybe less. Get the shots, it's a huge hassle but that's all. But take your Nintendo Switch to the emergency room with you. If you get ten minutes away from home and realize you didn't bring it, go back for it. Trust me.)