It was around 1 a.m. and I was walking around the back of Pi Kitchen with a friend. I stumbled across a little furry blob on the floor and got down on the ground to look at it. It was this baby brown bat, with its eyes closed and lying on the cold concrete. I made sure it was breathing, and as I contemplated what to do, my friend started poking the little guy with a chair leg. This felt cruel to me so I poked it a bit with my finger. I did not realize that poking a bat could potentially transmit rabies to me via some open paper cuts.
I went back to my room to ask my roommate what to do and if she would let me house the bat in a cardboard box in our room. I woke my roommate up at about 2:30 a.m. and frantically blabbed about the situation. Her first question was, “Did you wash your hands?” The position of our room is on the opposite side of the bathroom and I entered via the side closest to my room. I was going to wash my hands but I didn’t know that you could even get rabies from bats. I was under the impression that it was only from dogs. My roommate then proceeded to tell me this pertinent information and I started freaking out. She started giving me worst-case scenarios and my 3 a.m. brain led me to call the campus 24-hour health department. The nurse told me I could get a series of shots to prevent rabies, but I had only barely touched the bat, so I wasn’t even bitten. I was just worried that saliva could transmit rabies, and that there had to be a reason the bat was on the floor. I had also called my mom because this is definitely a “call your mom” situation and worried the hell out of her at 3 a.m.. She advised me against getting shots because she just thought there was no way I had got rabies from just poking a bat. So I eventually drifted to sleep around 4 a.m., not knowing if my days were numbered.
The next day I checked if the bat was still there and alive, and it was. So I called multiple animal rescue centers and informed the campus police. The lady from the bat rescue gave me quite literally the worst advice possible. She advised me to pick up the bat, with my bare hands, and place it in a box and put it indoors. A quick Google search tells you to under no circumstance ever touch a bat with your bare hands. But she did send someone to come get the bat so I hope that little buddy was rehabbed and released.
I’ve forgotten about this situation until now, but when I think back to this absolute journey of my first two semesters at Stevens, I am reminded that because of technology and modern healthcare, natural selection truly doesn’t matter anymore. If it did, my sheer frequency of finding out things by touching them would have killed me years ago.
