Assume the Worst

Last Tuesday at midnight, I woke up in the middle of a hot flash as Dave was getting up to go to the bathroom. Ralphie, ever alert to our movements, hopped from the bed to investigate the sudden change in status. He followed Dave to the bedroom door where he hovered, presumably because he had to know where The Man One went. After Dave returned and crawled back into bed, Ralphie needed a little coaxing to resume his spot. Instead of curling up and going back to sleep, however, he climbed up to the head of the bed. On hot nights he tends to avoid the top of the bed, but there he was, sniffing, next to my pillow. I hoped he’d cuddle, but he leapt off the bed and rushed to the other window, still sniffing. For the next several minutes, Ralphie chased something around the bedroom–head lifted toward the ceiling and shifting on a dime. It was pretty impressive, but whatever he was trying to catch had some mad flying skills.

“It’s probably the beetle I saw earlier,” I said, so confident. “Ralph, get back in bed; you’re not going to catch him.”

Ralphie ignored me. I sat up and watched as he continued to spin around the room. Then something black swooped over me–it was a little bigger than a Monarch butterfly. “That’s not a beetle!” I shrieked and pulled the covers over my head. “Make it go away!”

Dave, like the good husband he is, got out of bed and looked around.

I peeked from under my covers. “Turn the light on,” I suggested. He did. As I dove back under the covers, again shrieking, Dave said, “I think it’s a bird.”

“It’s not a bird.”

He took a beat.

“No, it’s not a bird.”

Underneath the blankets I shivered, so creeped out by the bat flying around our bedroom.

Meanwhile, Dave and Ralphie watched as it banked again and again around the room. “Wow!” Dave said. “It can really fly!”

I wasn’t interested in its prowess. “Open the door!” It wasn’t a suggestion. (We have to keep our bedroom door closed at night or Ralphie will go charging down the stairs–barking–at regular intervals.)

I heard the door open and a moment later close.

“Is it gone?” I pulled the covers off my head.

“I think so,” Dave said. “It flew around the hall for a minute, but I think it found its way out the door.” He turned off the light and climbed back into bed. Ralphie stood by the bedroom door for another minute before he, too, jumped on the bed, curled up, and went to sleep. Dave started to slip back to sleep.

I, on the other hand, was WIDE awake. A bat had just flown around my bedroom. That by itself isn’t such a big deal. It’s just a (creepy) little winged creature–most likely more afraid of me–that simply wanted to catch some bugs. I  was kept awake by something I remembered hearing while in graduate school: the fiancé of a friend telling a story about a bat flying around in a restaurant–how that had been considered dangerous because of the potential for rabies infection from a fly-by. He was a med student and spoke with authority. Wikipedia didn’t yet exist and instead of questioning him or looking it up in the library, I merely stored this terrifying little nugget of (mis)information in that vault in my mind where such things lurk and moved along.

Until Tuesday. I spent the early hours of that morning convinced that the bat had sprayed rabies ALL OVER my room. I know, rationally, that such a thing isn’t possible.* I’m not an idiot. But at 12:30 on Tuesday morning I wasn’t operating from rational thought. I was operating from fear and a super-charged imagination.

What’s the worst thing someone can do in such a situation? Yep, consult the Internet, whose slogan should be “Assume the Worst!” The next morning I looked stuff up on the Center for Disease Control website. According to the CDC, if you wake up to find a bat in your room, you have to assume the worst. That’s not how they phrase it, but that’s what they mean. I sat in my office wondering how long the bat had been in the room–had we been asleep? Had it entered not through the upstairs deck door as I thought, but through the window over the bed? Had it crawled through that window and hung over me while I slept? Had it landed on me? Had it bitten me or Dave or Ralphie? Stories began to spin themselves–fueled by a catastrophic imagination, an episode of House, and an episode of Scrubs. (Who knew such different tv shows could make use of a rabies death?) To stop the stories from spinning out of my control, I made several phone calls, starting with the Advice Nurse. The one for my doctor’s office had to call back later, so I tried the Anthem Blue Cross Advice Nurse. She was a lovely lady, based in Atlanta, I think, who had had to get a bat out of her house recently. Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell me much–she was searching the CDC website for information. She suggested that I call the CDC and helpfully gave me the number.

So I called the CDC. The sweet lady on the other end read me what was on their website. While I was answering a brief survey about customer service, my other line buzzed. The Advice Nurse from One Medical had returned my call. Another nice woman spoke to me–this one in San Francisco. She didn’t have very much experience with bats. We began to bandy about the terms “post exposure prophylaxis,” which I had learned from the CDC website. Apparently rabies shots have gotten less daunting than they were when we were kids. Now it’s just a series of four shots to the upper arm, not the gazillion shots to the belly we whispered about as children, wide-eyed and thrilled by the horror.

But as nice as she was, she couldn’t give me any advice beyond considering the shots or contacting the Marin Department of Public Health. I asked her what she would do, and she replied, “That’s a good question. It’s kind of a tough call in this case, because you don’t want to take any unnecessary medication, but rabies is fatal.” Yes, well. I took down the number of the public health department and thanked her. She wished me luck.

By now I had to get going–I had a Pilates private session to teach. Plus I was all phoned out. I asked Dave to call the health department while I was gone. As anyone who knows Dave can imagine, he was completely blithe about the whole thing. Maybe not completely, but he wasn’t really worried. He agreed to call them and to stop by the vet’s office. (I made the mistake of looking things up like cases of rabies in dogs with up-to-date vaccines. It can happen.)

Luckily my client that morning was the daughter of another client–a marvelous man and retired surgeon who knows about my health concerns. He happened to drop her off for her session, and naturally I told him–mocking myself as I do to hide my fear. He waved it off, laughing, and said I shouldn’t worry about it, which mollified me for an hour.

Meanwhile, Dave had called the public health department. He told me when I called him from the Good Earth parking lot that they suggested we take the prophylaxis. So he’d called the closest urgent care center that had the shots, and they said to come in as soon as possible. Cue freak-out. I kept myself pulled together to grocery shop, but visions of horrible things accompanied me home. No matter how much I pushed them aside, they kept storming back. Lunch was a tense affair–Dave insisted we eat because who knew how long we’d be at Urgent Care? But we finally made it out of the house and up to Terra Linda.

Dave and I have a lot of experience of emergency rooms together. We had only been dating a few months when I had an acute case of appendicitis that led to a morning at the UC Davis Student Healthcare Center and then the afternoon and night at Sutter Davis Hospital. We’ve also been to Sutter Davis for a couple of serious asthma attacks (mine). I find trips to the ER with Dave very entertaining. Something about medical facilities inspires his already great sense of humor and timing. So it was only fitting that we spent part of our thirteenth anniversary at Urgent Care.

By this point in the day we had come to a clearer sense of the timeline–determining that we were awake when the bat entered the premises–and we were also pretty sure that we hadn’t been bitten. But those damn websites I consulted made it sound as though a bat could swoop in, bite its victim, and swoop away completely undetected. And that it would leave the tiniest of marks, easy to overlook. (Who the fuck writes these websites anyway?). Since rabies is fatal, I was not taking any chances.

Urgent Care was not busy, so we were seen pretty quickly, starting with Dave. Just before my turn, I heard the doctor in the hallway saying, “He’s fine with not getting the shots.” Then he came into the room and calm descended. He told me about Dave’s decision but added that I don’t have to do the same thing. Then he said that he didn’t think I needed the shots, but it was up to me. Naturally I was torn. He inspected me for bites, found none, and reassured me that if it were he, he would not bother with them. I debated–thinking that I might spend the next ten days seeing rabies in a headache or a sore muscle. Finally, my nascent rationality, something I’ve been working on, took over. “Let’s skip it,” I said.

“I think that’s the right decision,” he replied. Then he got up to do my paperwork, sending me down the hall to sit with Dave. When the nurse came in to give us our paperwork, she said, “The nurses all think you made the right choice.” That statement provided the most comfort all day. We thanked the staff for their wonderful treatment and headed home to Ralphie, who had forgotten the whole incident and just wanted to play fetch.

That night over dinner, Dave and I talked about death and fear and life and love. We toasted our thirteen years of marriage, made plans for the future, and reminded each other how lucky we are. We imagined the best.

 

*I have a theory about the bat spraying rabies: rabies is transmitted through saliva. A rabid bat can drip saliva from above, unlike a land-bound creature that has to bite to spread the disease. In the infinitesimal chance that a bit of infected bat saliva lands on a freshly opened wound or in your eye, you might contract rabies from a bat flying overhead. But that’s just my theory.