We sprang out of bed.
“What is it?” Rebekah asked me.
“Turn it off,” I said, pointing to the television. I ran out of the room to get something with which to trap this intruder while Rebekah fiddled with the remote.
“Is it a bird?” she asked.
“It’s a bat,” I said.
* * *
Only hours before, while preparing what turned out to be an unexceptional pasta dinner, we were listening to an old episode of This American Life. When their scary-themed Halloween show first aired last October, Rebekah hadn’t wanted to listen to it alone. Now that I was back in Argentina, she cued up the episode. In the second act, Alex Blumberg tells the story of a woman bitten by a rabid raccoon in New York and, responsible reporter that he is, he decided to share “a quick public service announcement”:
“A bat can bite you in your sleep without you even knowing it and without leaving a mark. So if you find one in a room with a sleeping person, you have to catch it and have it tested. And if you can’t catch it, you should go to a doctor. I’m serious. I learned about this, it freaked me out and now I want to tell people.”
It worked. We freaked. We weren’t asleep when we saw the bat, but it was in our room, wasn’t it? None of the windows in the apartment had screens, but none of them were open at the time, either – too many bugs at night. Which meant the bat had been living with us! I mean, he could have spent many nights in our room! Couldn’t he have bitten us already? We wouldn’t have known a thing!
We trapped the bat under an overturned bucket and then started googling frantically. Everything Blumberg had said was true. Rabies is basically 100% fatal, and though bats aren’t generally rabid animals, the ones that act strangely – those that enter buildings or lie on bedroom floors motionless, for instance – are more likely to have rabies than others. And the disease, which exists on every continent except Antarctica, had reappeared in Córdoba only one year before.
We called our Argentine friends, Pamela and Martin, first. Then we called Candy, our landlord’s friend who had come to visit us at the apartment earlier that week. They were unfazed, neither by the fact that it was midnight, nor by our story. After all, the bat hadn’t bitten us. Pamela and Martin kindly indulged our yanqui paranoia, offering to take us to the hospital. Candy calmly told us that she had once seen a bat at the apartment before, but that they had managed to get it out of the house.
“Have you gotten rid of it?” she asked, as if it were that simple.
Rebekah was convinced that we should get rid of the bat. Alex Blumberg, however, had told us to keep it, to have it tested.
“What are we going to do?” she asked. “We’re going to go to a hospital, and they’re going to look at us like we’re crazy, coming in with a bat. And do you really think they’ll be able to test this thing?”
She had a point. I hadn’t yet seen the inside of an Argentine hospital, but from the stories I had heard, my confidence in the system wasn’t all that high. In fact, for precisely this reason, many American travel doctors recommend that people spending long stretches of time in developing countries (in other words, us) get all the vaccines they might need in the US before they leave. Including the vaccine against rabies. Neither of us had done this.
We slid a piece of cardboard under the bucket, walked it over to our kitchen window, and let the bat fly away.
We called my sister Lea (a 2nd-year med student) and Rebekah’s friends Puneet and Gurmukh (both doctors) for advice. “Our professors tell us that we shouldn’t get stuck with any needles unless we’re in the US or Canada,” Lea said. “And not really in Canada, either.” Puneet and Gurmukh were convinced we could find a private hospital that catered to rich people and foreigners, and encouraged us to get the vaccine.
We also called my parents, who began working their rolodexes. Within minutes, we were cc’ed on an email from a close family friend at the State Department, to the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. We later talked to the “duty officer” at the Embassy in Buenos Aires who gave us some names of hospitals in Córdoba. He assured us that Argentine hospitals – especially the private ones – were well equipped to administer vaccines. My mother began exchanging emails with a prominent medical anthropologist and medical doctor who runs an NGO that builds hospitals in developing countries around the world. He also suggested we get the vaccine.
At the infectious diseases hospital the next morning, the waiting room seemed unusually full. A woman came out of one of the examination rooms, crying. She breezed right by us and out the door. Rebekah was talking to the receptionist. A man was sleeping in one of the molded-plastic seats, his nose sticking straight up in the air, mouth open, nostrils on full view. He looked the way Charlie Brown does when he sings. I noticed a young boy nearby who was covered in some kind of rash, probably a symptom of another disease I should be (but am not) vaccinated against. We presented our passports to the skeptical woman behind the desk, and took a seat near the window.
The man sitting next to me was holding something in a plastic bag, some kind of bug. From his explanation it sounded as though this bug had bitten someone, the woman sitting next to him, probably. She did not speak or do much of anything. Occasionally, she would massage her ankle. I turned to Rebekah.
“We should have kept the bat.”
When we finally met with him, the doctor at the hospital informed us that the only place in the province of Córdoba that had the vaccine was the Anti-Rabies Institute, and it was closed on Sundays. So on Monday morning, thirty-six hours after the bat entered our lives and our bedroom, we got in a cab and gave the driver the address of the Instituto Antirrabico. He didn’t recognize the street name, but he said he knew where it was.
The institute turned out to be in one of central Córdoba’s poorer barrios, set in the middle of a scrubby grass lot. The only sign of any sort is the iron lettering above the entrance, but the first indication of what purpose this building serves is the unsettling sound of dogs barking. Whether the dogs were particularly angry, actually rabid, or just tired of being cooped up, I couldn’t tell. There were even a few dogs milling around – no leash, no chain, no enclosure – and one came up to me and sniffed my crotch. I was not thrilled. Dogs may be “man’s best friend” . . . but at an anti-rabies institute?
Carlos, an agricultural engineer with a grey mustache and a horseshoe of white hair around his head, greeted us at the door with a smile. He told us he didn’t deal with “la rabia,” but with Chagas disease. Only endemic to the Americas, and primarily found in poorer communities, Chagas disease is a real concern for health workers in Latin America. Rebekah, a medical anthropologist by profession and an activist on behalf of those less fortunate by disposition, immediately began peppering Carlos with questions.
He didn’t ask too many questions.
“Did you get bit by the bat?”
Only hours before, while preparing what turned out to be an unexceptional pasta dinner, we were listening to an old episode of This American Life. When their scary-themed Halloween show first aired last October, Rebekah hadn’t wanted to listen to it alone. Now that I was back in Argentina, she cued up the episode. In the second act, Alex Blumberg tells the story of a woman bitten by a rabid raccoon in New York and, responsible reporter that he is, he decided to share “a quick public service announcement”:
“A bat can bite you in your sleep without you even knowing it and without leaving a mark. So if you find one in a room with a sleeping person, you have to catch it and have it tested. And if you can’t catch it, you should go to a doctor. I’m serious. I learned about this, it freaked me out and now I want to tell people.”
It worked. We freaked. We weren’t asleep when we saw the bat, but it was in our room, wasn’t it? None of the windows in the apartment had screens, but none of them were open at the time, either – too many bugs at night. Which meant the bat had been living with us! I mean, he could have spent many nights in our room! Couldn’t he have bitten us already? We wouldn’t have known a thing!
We trapped the bat under an overturned bucket and then started googling frantically. Everything Blumberg had said was true. Rabies is basically 100% fatal, and though bats aren’t generally rabid animals, the ones that act strangely – those that enter buildings or lie on bedroom floors motionless, for instance – are more likely to have rabies than others. And the disease, which exists on every continent except Antarctica, had reappeared in Córdoba only one year before.
We called our Argentine friends, Pamela and Martin, first. Then we called Candy, our landlord’s friend who had come to visit us at the apartment earlier that week. They were unfazed, neither by the fact that it was midnight, nor by our story. After all, the bat hadn’t bitten us. Pamela and Martin kindly indulged our yanqui paranoia, offering to take us to the hospital. Candy calmly told us that she had once seen a bat at the apartment before, but that they had managed to get it out of the house.
“Have you gotten rid of it?” she asked, as if it were that simple.
Rebekah was convinced that we should get rid of the bat. Alex Blumberg, however, had told us to keep it, to have it tested.
“What are we going to do?” she asked. “We’re going to go to a hospital, and they’re going to look at us like we’re crazy, coming in with a bat. And do you really think they’ll be able to test this thing?”
She had a point. I hadn’t yet seen the inside of an Argentine hospital, but from the stories I had heard, my confidence in the system wasn’t all that high. In fact, for precisely this reason, many American travel doctors recommend that people spending long stretches of time in developing countries (in other words, us) get all the vaccines they might need in the US before they leave. Including the vaccine against rabies. Neither of us had done this.
We slid a piece of cardboard under the bucket, walked it over to our kitchen window, and let the bat fly away.
We called my sister Lea (a 2nd-year med student) and Rebekah’s friends Puneet and Gurmukh (both doctors) for advice. “Our professors tell us that we shouldn’t get stuck with any needles unless we’re in the US or Canada,” Lea said. “And not really in Canada, either.” Puneet and Gurmukh were convinced we could find a private hospital that catered to rich people and foreigners, and encouraged us to get the vaccine.
We also called my parents, who began working their rolodexes. Within minutes, we were cc’ed on an email from a close family friend at the State Department, to the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. We later talked to the “duty officer” at the Embassy in Buenos Aires who gave us some names of hospitals in Córdoba. He assured us that Argentine hospitals – especially the private ones – were well equipped to administer vaccines. My mother began exchanging emails with a prominent medical anthropologist and medical doctor who runs an NGO that builds hospitals in developing countries around the world. He also suggested we get the vaccine.
* * *
At the infectious diseases hospital the next morning, the waiting room seemed unusually full. A woman came out of one of the examination rooms, crying. She breezed right by us and out the door. Rebekah was talking to the receptionist. A man was sleeping in one of the molded-plastic seats, his nose sticking straight up in the air, mouth open, nostrils on full view. He looked the way Charlie Brown does when he sings. I noticed a young boy nearby who was covered in some kind of rash, probably a symptom of another disease I should be (but am not) vaccinated against. We presented our passports to the skeptical woman behind the desk, and took a seat near the window.
The man sitting next to me was holding something in a plastic bag, some kind of bug. From his explanation it sounded as though this bug had bitten someone, the woman sitting next to him, probably. She did not speak or do much of anything. Occasionally, she would massage her ankle. I turned to Rebekah.
“We should have kept the bat.”
* * *
When we finally met with him, the doctor at the hospital informed us that the only place in the province of Córdoba that had the vaccine was the Anti-Rabies Institute, and it was closed on Sundays. So on Monday morning, thirty-six hours after the bat entered our lives and our bedroom, we got in a cab and gave the driver the address of the Instituto Antirrabico. He didn’t recognize the street name, but he said he knew where it was.
The institute turned out to be in one of central Córdoba’s poorer barrios, set in the middle of a scrubby grass lot. The only sign of any sort is the iron lettering above the entrance, but the first indication of what purpose this building serves is the unsettling sound of dogs barking. Whether the dogs were particularly angry, actually rabid, or just tired of being cooped up, I couldn’t tell. There were even a few dogs milling around – no leash, no chain, no enclosure – and one came up to me and sniffed my crotch. I was not thrilled. Dogs may be “man’s best friend” . . . but at an anti-rabies institute?
Carlos, an agricultural engineer with a grey mustache and a horseshoe of white hair around his head, greeted us at the door with a smile. He told us he didn’t deal with “la rabia,” but with Chagas disease. Only endemic to the Americas, and primarily found in poorer communities, Chagas disease is a real concern for health workers in Latin America. Rebekah, a medical anthropologist by profession and an activist on behalf of those less fortunate by disposition, immediately began peppering Carlos with questions.
The building hasn’t been updated since 1970. Carlos’s office is separated from the rest of the space by thin wooden walls about ten feet tall, and every surface is covered with stuff: maps of the province hang on the walls, drawings of insects are draped over filing cabinets, and crammed onto the desk in the center of the office is an array of used food service containers that contain Carlos’s specimens. He jiggled some bugs out of a styrofoam cup onto a white paper plate. “Chagas,” he said, knowing that neither Rebekah nor I would know the name of the insect that transmits the disease. One of them was still moving, but Carlos didn’t seem all that concerned. Another worker who had been following us around (it isn’t every day that two extranjeros come to the institute and take pictures) picked up a glass jar labeled “ajies” and showed it to me. The brown thing inside was definitely not a pickled pepper. “Escorpión,” he said, jabbing his fingers at the air in front of my face, to simulate stinging.
At this point the doctor came into Carlos’s office, so we didn’t find out what poisonous creatures were being kept in the coke bottle or the empty Quilmes beer can. Like everyone else at the clinic, the doctor was male, mustached, and over fifty, and all that distinguished him from the others was his white coat, which didn’t look like it had been cleaned all that recently.
He didn’t ask too many questions.
“Did you get bit by the bat?”
We tried to explain that we had heard that a person can be bit and not know it, but he wasn’t buying any of it.
“Do you have the bat with you?”
* * *
Summer in Córdoba is famously hot, so much so that during the hottest month – January – many businesses close their doors, and people head for cooler climes in the surrounding hills. But the hot weather sticks around, and it was still with us in March.
It wasn’t just the heat that was keeping us up at night; it was the uncertainty. We vacillated countless times over the next three days, trying to decide whether or not to get this vaccine, and eventually, when Rebekah began complaining of mysterious itches, headaches, a cough, and feeling feverish, our rational thinking broke in the face of our fear.
We got on a plane to Buenos Aires on Thursday morning and headed for the wonderful (and private) Hospital Aleman and began our series of vaccinations. This was more for our peace of mind than anything else, but it was well worth the 250 pesos a shot. The traveling back and forth to and from the capital (because the vaccine our friends at the Centro Antirrabico had was an older one that had a greater instance of negative side effects) is annoying, but it did allow us a few days to visit some shops in the Jewish barrio of Buenos Aires so we could stock up on food for Passover.
We’re getting our fifth and final rabies shot on Thursday. But we’ll still be sleeping with the windows closed. Especially since there is now officially a dengue epidemic in Argentina.
It wasn’t just the heat that was keeping us up at night; it was the uncertainty. We vacillated countless times over the next three days, trying to decide whether or not to get this vaccine, and eventually, when Rebekah began complaining of mysterious itches, headaches, a cough, and feeling feverish, our rational thinking broke in the face of our fear.
We got on a plane to Buenos Aires on Thursday morning and headed for the wonderful (and private) Hospital Aleman and began our series of vaccinations. This was more for our peace of mind than anything else, but it was well worth the 250 pesos a shot. The traveling back and forth to and from the capital (because the vaccine our friends at the Centro Antirrabico had was an older one that had a greater instance of negative side effects) is annoying, but it did allow us a few days to visit some shops in the Jewish barrio of Buenos Aires so we could stock up on food for Passover.
We’re getting our fifth and final rabies shot on Thursday. But we’ll still be sleeping with the windows closed. Especially since there is now officially a dengue epidemic in Argentina.
3 comments:
Yikes! I hope you're ok but regardless such a good story and so well told. Can't wait to see you and celebrate this summer!
I often wondered what it would take to bring Jonah that close to a needle full of medicine. Short of a rabid bat, I thought, nothing would suffice. I was vindicated, of course, by this incredible bat-tale. Now Jonah, I know this will likely make you fearless around stray dogs, to which I say, excellent news. Now you can share mate with those adorable pups and not-so-pups in the square without a care.
I think there's a batmobile joke somewhere in here, but I can't come up with it...
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