Bats on Ice

You know that Beyoncé song, "Cigars on Ice?" According to the Beyoncé dictionary, because that's a thing, Cigars on Ice (n.) is defined as "the practice of drinking alcohol on the rocks while smoking cigars, two luxury status symbols at the same time." This post has absolutely nothing to do with that song, other than I had it stuck in my head while I was writing this post. And because this post tells the tale of how I put a bat on ice. Minor point. 

Monday morning, I was awoken by the following texts from my roommate:

I think a bat got inside our house and is outside our [bedroom] door. We're kinda trapped.
Jack saved us. 

I detected a hint of urgency/emotional trauma in her texts (I am a doctor in training, after all) so I decided to drag myself out of bed and head downstairs to investigate.

Apparently, when she woke up that morning, my roommate heard a commotion coming from our kitchen. When she opened her bedroom door, to her horror, she was greeted by a bat flying straight toward her face. As she slammed the door, she noticed my cat (Jack), deep in the throws of the hunt, leaping after our uninvited house guest. While she and her boyfriend were in her room trying to figure out what to do, Jack tracked down the bat and killed it. I at first found this part of the story difficult to believe, since normally Jack can't be bothered to kill stink bugs, let alone winged vermin. But I guess he realized his moment to achieve glory had finally arrived and he leapt for it. Pun intended.

I didn't think much of the whole incident. My dad is a retired game warden and growing up, I saw my fair share of dead things. Needless to say, my threshold for "ick" is pretty high. So, with the bat securely tied in a trash bag and in the basement awaiting garbage removal, I thought the story was pretty much over.

Incidentally, Jack had a check up appointment at the vet scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. While we were at the vet, I mentioned that he had killed a bat in my house the day before. One rabies booster later, we were on our way out of the office when the vet poked her head back in and told me that I might consider calling the Public Health Department so they could come pick up the bat and test it for rabies, just in case.

Once we got home, and after giving Jack the appropriate amount of treats earned for the thorough ear washing and shots he had bravely endured at the vet (9 treats, by my calculations), I dialed up the local public health department, for what I thought would be a brief call.

It was not a brief call.

Twenty minutes later, I was half way through filling out an incident report form with a lovely woman named Diane who needed to know how many people were in the home at the time of the bat incident, how old said residents were, what said residents cell phone numbers were, and whether or not said residents had:
Noticed any small bite marks on our person
Woken up in the middle of the night to a bat flying around the room
Felt a bat fly by our face
Touched the bat
Touched the carcass of a dead bat with bare hands
Touched anything the bat might have touched
Touched any bat feces
Seen a small child touch the bat
Seen a small child in a room with the bat

When Diane had extrapolated all of the pertinent information regarding the bat incident, I was told to wait for her supervisor to call me. Apparently, this was going straight to the top.

So, 4 minutes later, Supervisor Maureen called and pretty much repeated the same conversation I had with Diane minutes earlier. Except Maureen wanted me to take the bat to get tested for rabies. (For future reference, the public health department does not make house calls to pick up dead, potentially rabid wildlife.) Maureen then instructed me to put the bat in "coolants." When I asked her if she meant antifreeze, she was slightly exacerbated by my "silliness" because she meant ice. After I put the bat in coolants/ice, I was to put the bat in the refrigerator and label it to make sure no one would eat it (Welcome to "Pensiltucky," everyone) and bring it in to the Public Health Department first thing Wednesday morning.

I mentioned my threshold for ick was pretty high. This is also largely in part because I grew up in a family that hunts, so dead animals next to my frozen foods was not new territory. My roommate, however, was not used this particular method of storage. So the bat spent the night in the basement in a Tupperware dish on ice. Hence, bats on ice... 

This morning I woke up and took our furry deceased friend to the local Public Health Department Office where Diane and Nurse Dave were waiting for me. Our bat will be shipped to the lab today and hopefully we'll have the results tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed the bat is rabies free. 

As for the hero of our story, he is still walking around his castle (AKA my house) like a soldier home from Nam.

He is also getting used to his new anthem, nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah Bat Cat. 

UPDATE: The Public Health Department called, and the bat tested negative for rabies. Hallelujah.