This Labor Day Weekend

We spent Saturday afternoon sitting on the Phoenix with our good condo neighbors Gary and Ann. We planned a river cruise Sunday with the destination being a property they own a few miles down river. After a great evening watching the marina activity, the sun going down and the full moon rising, Wendy and I retired early.

We were watching Mike Rowe's "Dirtiest Jobs" on Discovery channel when something fluttered by the screen. For the first instant we thought it was part of the show, but quickly realized we had a bat in our bedroom. I left Mike Rowe working in a sewer as I leapt out of bed, donned my housecoat and began following the panicked creature down the stairs to the main level.

I turned on the lights and slid open the patio door as the bat did radar guided, aerobatic spirals around the vaulted ceiling of the living room. I positioned myself in the only other doorway out of the room. Each time he tried to fly by me I waved a hat and he circled back towards the open door but never went outside. I don’t know who was more hyped - Wendy, me or the bat! This frantic cycle, like an indoor model airplane show continued at least a dozen times until the frightened and exhausted little urchin came to rest upside down, hanging by his feet from a brick of the fireplace.

Ahah! This was my chance. As I scooped the bat off the mantel with my hat and tried to manipulate the quivering and terrified little devil out the open door, I felt a tiny prick in the end of my fourth finger of my left hand. He had bitten me right through the hat. Before I realized I should have captured him for a rabies analysis, he flew away into the darkness outside.



On the prompting of my son Tim, I rejected the telephone advice of the duty nurse at the hospital, who, after conferring with a Doctor, referred me to the Health Unit on Tuesday. Instead, I drove myself over to Emergency and went inside to the waiting room to spend the rest of the day socializing with a broad cross section of people who, like me, were wishing they were somewhere else. However, rabies, once the symptoms manifest themselves, has no cure, so I reasoned that a timely trip to emerg was not being frivolous.

There was to be no trip “down that lazy river” today. Of course it was one of the warmest, finest days of the summer as I rewarded myself for my stupidity by spending the whole day in a dingy hospital. Nine shots later, distributed amongst my arm, my butt, and most painfully, my finger, I was unceremoniously released to go home as the sun began to set. The Health Unit will call me on Tuesday to arrange the rest of my shots for day 3, day 7, day 14 and day 28.

What did you do on the long weekend?


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