About two months ago, the weekend of January 15/16, I saw a bat flying in my basement. The closest it came to me was about 6-8 feet (2-2.5 meters). It was day time, around 2:30pm. My first instinct was to run up stairs and close my basement door so it didn’t get in our living space. I then did some research on how to capture a bat in your house. I devised a plan, went back down to the basement to find and hopefully capture the bat but the bat was gone. I looked everywhere. I assume it went back into the small space where it came from. I live in a house built in 1922 and apparently bats can easily travel in walls and other spaces from the attic to the basement. So the only option I had at this point was to make sure I excluded any possible way for the bat to find it’s way into our bedroom. I put a door sweep under our basement door. We also have old cast iron radiators and there’s about a 1 cm gap between the floor and pipe that runs to the basement. I stuffed these gaps with steel wool.
My anxiety began once I started googling ways to find a hidden bat in a basement. I started finding all the articles about bat rabies and how 70% of the rabies cases in the U.S. come from bats. Many of those unfortunate people who did get rabies don’t recall having contact with a bat but some of them did see one flying in their house at some point. Then there’s also the people who actually did wake up with a bat on them. My anxious mind kept thinking that the bat might have made its way into our bedroom before I noticed it flying in the basement. It could have easily slipped through the gap in the radiator pipes or under the gap between the basement door and the floor. We also don’t shut our bedroom door all the time when we go to sleep. So like many of you I kept thinking, what if the bat bit one of us while we were sleeping and had one of these “undetected” bat bites because their teeth are so small and sharp. I’m not sure if this is considered a “ninja” bat or not because I actually did see one in my house. Technically we never woke up to a bat in our bedroom but a bat certainly had access to our bedroom if it wanted to be there.
As some time went by, my anxiety started to ease. I was comforted by the fact that it’s winter where I live and it’s not likely bats are showing signs of rabies in the winter. Rabies virus apparently hibernates with the bats. Just as I was starting to get more and more comfortable that I didn’t get bit by a bat in my sleep, on March 7, about nine days ago (from the day this was posted) I woke up with some dried blood under my lip. I wiped away the dried blood and noticed two red marks, about 1/2 cm apart. My wife who doesn’t have health anxiety like I do said it was likely from shaving the day before. Perhaps I irritated some hair follicles and when I rolled over on my pillow, I opened them up and they started to bleed a bit. I didn’t notice any raised bumps or irritated hair follicles before I went to bed. When I got home from work that day, to try to ease my anxiety, I looked everywhere in my bedroom for a bat - behind picture frames, under and behind all furniture, shook all of our hanging clothes, looked in shoes…everywhere. I didn’t find a bat. However…I did discover this piece of missing wood floor in the bottom of my closet next to the wall. I believe the previous home owners removed it so they could thread a wire from the basement into the wall. The important part you need to know is, there was access from my basement to our bedroom.
I know that the odds of a bat finding the one hole in the floor from our basement to our bedroom, biting me on my face while I’m sleeping, hard enough to draw some blood without waking me up, in the winter time and then flying back down that hole are exceedingly rare. I know this. But I just can’t get over the fact that I woke up with dried blood on my face with two red marks 1/2 cm apart. Yes, it’s possible that it was something I did shaving but I’ve never woke up with dried blood on my face before. I've never woken up with blood on my face. The two small red marks went away after a couple of days. I did take a photo but a doctor really couldn't determine what it is with a photo.
PEP in the U.S. costs between $3000-$10000. I don’t want to go to the ER and get these shots unless absolutely necessary and technically I don’t fall under the CDC’s guidelines for being a candidate for PEP because I never woke to a bat in my bedroom and didn’t have contact with a bat. I really don’t know what to do and feel as if the clock is ticking. If a bat did in fact bite my face without waking me up, the incubation period for a rabies face bite can be much quicker than the average of 60 days. Would you chock this up as an unfortunate coincidence? Is my anxiety just getting the best of me here? Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated. Thank you if you made it this far.
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Originally Posted by Jduke
