The Adventures of Bat-girl

And we’re back from an unanticipated summer hiatus, thanks to an enthusiastic lakeshore visitor and an exaggerated immune response to the rabies shots* the public health service insisted on preserving yours truly’s life with.

Taking s’more adventures to comic/book heights… ✨

*Public Service Announcement: Rabies vaccines are perfectly safe for folks with normal immune systems – and even in this freakish case, at no point did Public Health consider not administering doses, because rabies would be worse.  It’s undetectable before symptoms appear, and then 100% fatal.

Any exposure, go straight to a doctor – even, as Jenna Fischer teaches us on Office Ladies, if you wake up in a room with a bat in the corner and no visible marks on you: they often don’t leave any!

Below, the tale.

The Adventures of Bat-girl (Or, The Rabid Dog Daze of Summer)

We find our person-imbued-with-main-character-energy on a trip “home” in a July week full of Canuck summer staples: Muskoka chair reading and napping; lake swimming and general tick-avoidance; an annual hour of father-daughter tennis; abusing the new cell tower across the lake, nicknamed the Eye of Sauron for its insistent blinking accompanied by absolutely zero contribution to the cell signal in its direct line of sight; s'mores by sparkler-light…

Deck to lake life: patience is a virtue, but (dog) paddling and water (frisbee) are divine.

…Bird Nerding with the Maternal Expert; kayaking, once the earwig nests have been evicted from the boats - with great patience on the part of the father, since the daughter insists they not just drown them all outright; manifesting the "it's like riding a bike" cliché so fully that her first cycle in three years ends in a several-kilometre, gravel-hill-defying, mud-splattered sprint through a thunderstorm; and family baseball game attendance, which establishes conclusively that

1) nothing is as hot as a scorcher on plastic ball diamond seats,

2) baseball is the best, not least because it's the only sport that's so leisurely you can fit in several other pastimes and multiple baseball-bat-sized beverages during a game without missing any of the action, and

3) condiments splodged from a communal pump at an unrefrigerated station along a concrete walkway are truly the only way to dress a hot dog.

Root, root, rootin' for the home team.

Then, at the very end of her visit – as narrative structure demands, and as the lakeside fire has burned low – something big and heavy (even bigger than the mosquitoes) flies into her face by the water after dark, and since the same thing had happened to the Paternal Expert only the other night, they must assume The Worst: Possibly Rabid Flying Mammal.

The public health phone line insists that the potential transformation involved would not be as much fun as Bruce Wayne’s costume or cave.  So our not-quite-Bat-girl, on arriving back at her “big-girl” home, heads straight from the airport to the hospital, either carrying the putative mutative germ – or not.  Schrödinger’s bat.

She enjoys a fifteen-hour overnight wait at her local emergency room, which is appropriate given that she is the least urgent case in the department, and yet also inappropriate because nobody who has been medically advised to seek "urgent" care should have to wait fifteen hours to access it.  She is soothed over these slow hours by Geralt of Rivia, though tragically not in person.

Since un-Bat-girl’s immune system lacks some basic antibody building blocks, her first dose of vaccine-PLUS involves four injections in various body parts, including one as close to the exposure as possible, i.e. directly under her eye.

By this point she has been slumped in airport, airplane and ER chairs for almost twenty-four hours.  She does not smell nice.  Hoping to distract the ER doc, she makes him laugh as he loads the under-eye syringe by telling him, "It’s cool, I trust you.  Just don't miss."

The author with a faceful of human blood products to counter possible bat pathogens: alas, no new fangs either way.

The extra goodness from injection battery #1 provokes a systemic reaction in our antibody-low anti-hero that leaves her looking and sounding like a character from Fallout, which is entirely the wrong franchise.  Particularly ghoulish is the body-wide breakout into giant hives, including an infernal cluster of four in one underarm.  If you are supposing that four is quite a lot of very itchy hives to have piled under one arm, you are correct.

There follows a month-long sequence of boosters-and-reactions which she parries with a series of multi-day Benadryl naps.

After round #2, not-Bat-girl’s upper arm looks and feels roughly like it has been sleeve-tattooed with Carolina Reaper-infused chili oil.

Round #3 causes swelling that has the public health nurses (the actual heroes in this story) making genuinely interested, very comforting remarks like, “I've never seen that before!”

It’s with round #4 that we really see her body’s effort to turn at least one arm into a wing. Antihistamine-fuelled attempts at flight are unsuccessful, largely because they are unconscious.

Round #5 involves a personal call with the provincial health officer and an hour-and-a-half-long debate as to whether the booster has to be given back at the ER, because if the reactions continue on their present spiral "we can't intubate you here and we don't know if the ambulance will get here in time."

In the end they entrust the shot to her thigh’s larger lymphatic system, so she hobbles around for a few days and then IT IS DONE. She has the dubious honour of being the inspiration behind a push for a new inoculation injection protocol in her adoptive province – and she is profoundly grateful to have benefitted from that other classic Canadian hallmark, free universal health care.

And now she can pick veg from the garden at twilight by echolocation.

Kidding. 🦇