The bat stared at me from the towel with his little beady eyes – the towel I had just unwrapped from my wet hair, having also used it to dry myself post-shower.
Furry, brown, and the size of my palm, clinging onto the white towel with his leathery wings, the bat must surely have been in my shoulder-length hair at some point, and indeed on my body.
For a terrible second we looked at each other – bats aren’t blind, contrary to popular opinion – my skin crawling with horror. And then I fled the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. I may have screamed a bit too.
Later, nerves recovered, my literal brush with the bat during a weekend away in an old country cottage with friends seemed, if not amusing exactly, at least like a tale I could happily dine out on. No matter how squeamish I felt about him, he’d surely been more frightened of me, after all.
But within a day it would take a far darker turn, for what I learned on my return to London suggested my little friend wasn’t as harmless as at first I’d thought. Some British bats, I would discover, still carry rabies – a disease I grew up thinking was the most terrifying and deadly thing I could ever get – and a bite or scratch from one, or even contact with its saliva, can pass it onto humans.
Like many, I thought rabies had been completely eradicated from the UK – but no. The risk may not be high – less than 1 per cent of bats carry it – but the stakes, no pun intended, are as high as they can be. Rabies in humans is almost always fatal – once symptoms appear, agonising death occurs within as little as a week and at most a fortnight.
Which is why, shortly after returning from my country break, I became one of just a handful of people in the UK per year who need a major course of emergency rabies injections after a close encounter with a bat.
So how on earth did I get here, frantically rearranging my diary to ensure I make it to GP appointments to get jabbed on very specific dates – leaving me feeling lethargic, feverish and achy – so I don’t develop a tropical disease with less than a 1 per cent survival rate?
‘The bat must surely have been in my shoulder-length hair at some point, and indeed on my body,’ says Laura Connor
Last month, my school friends and I went on our biannual trip to a country cottage.
Despite busy careers, children and geographical distance, it’s a tradition we have maintained for 15 years in order to let off steam and have a much-needed catch up.
As we’ve got older, it’s inevitably become a more wholesome occasion – fewer drinking games and noise complaints – and this time round we booked an old guest house near Skipton in North Yorkshire so we could hike the Yorkshire Three Peaks.
My friend Emily and I arrived first, soon realising the old guest house was less quaint and endearing and more damp and creepy – with its own hairy airborne resident.
As I went into the kitchen for a glass of wine, I heard a blood-curdling scream from the living room.
‘There’s a bat!’ Emily yelled, slamming the door and trapping the creature inside.
Feminism vanished and we huddled in the kitchen until the men of the group arrived to take care of our flying friend, whom we named after Bruce Wayne (Batman’s real name).
Despite three thirty-something men spending over an hour trying to gently coax him out of the patio door with baking trays and brooms, Wayne was indefatigab’le.
‘I became one of just a handful of people in the UK per year who need a major course of emergency rabies injections’
He eventually wore himself out and curled up for a nap on the curtain rail. And we forgot he existed; out of sight, out of mind.
That was until the following evening. While we were all enjoying the hot tub in the garden after a tiring day of hiking, a well-rested Wayne got a second wind and was flapping around the living room again.
Perhaps we were too exhausted from his previous night’s antics, or tipsy enough from our pub lunch, but everyone seemed much more relaxed about the bat’s presence.
Too relaxed.
I got up from the hot tub to take a shower, picking up one of the fresh towels we had laid out on the living room sofa and snugly wrapping it around my swimming costume before pottering upstairs.
I climbed out of the shower and wrapped the towel I’d hung on the rail around me again before thoroughly drying myself, then tightly wrapping it around my head as a hair turban.
I spent a leisurely 20 minutes or so getting dressed and doing my skincare, before unwrapping the towel from my head and placing it back on the rail.
And there was Wayne staring back at me, wings measuring up to 25cm (I would later read) stretched out on my towel. He must have been in there all along, while I dried myself, when I wrapped the towel around my hair… I just hadn’t felt him.
Feminism vanished and we huddled in the kitchen until the men of the group arrived to take care of our flying friend.
Hearing my screams, my friend Aaron bravely ventured into the bat-infested bathroom to wrap the terrified Wayne back up in the towel before – finally! – releasing him outside.
For the next 12 hours, my experience was little more than the butt of (many unprintable) jokes.
Several of my friends in the group are doctors and no-one was concerned by my very close encounter with a wild bat.
When I got back to London the next evening, I started Googling.
‘Humans can catch rabies from a bat,’ the UK Government website warned.
The World Health Organisation said: ‘Bat rabies can be found in many countries including
the UK.’
‘Once clinical symptoms appear, rabies is fatal in 100% of cases.’
Clearly very little is known about bat bites and scratches in the UK, even among medical professionals, but understandably they’re taken extremely seriously.
In a blaze of panic, I started checking my body for any possible bite marks or scratches. According to the UK Health Security website, it’s not always obvious if you’ve been bitten or scratched by a bat and it may not leave a visible mark.
There was a new mark on my chest and another on my back. Or could Wayne, who we had concluded was probably a pipistrelle, have transferred his saliva onto my scalp while trapped in my hair without me knowing?
I messaged my GP friend who advised me to call the doctor first thing. Meanwhile, I read up on symptoms: fever and headache in the first few days followed by the classic, horror film symptoms of hydrophobia – fear of water – and, later, delirium. Was I starting to feel just a tiny bit hot?
Sheepishly telling the receptionist at my local NHS surgery on Monday morning that I may have been scratched by a bat trapped in my towel (while, ahem, naked), he told me the GP would call me back, so I went to work as normal and tried not to worry. At 1pm I got a call in the office from my GP: ‘Go straight to A&E.’
That’s all I was told, and it did little to reassure me. The triage nurse at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital was equally confused, barely containing her amusement as I told the story for the hundredth time.
She told me I’d need a tetanus and rabies jab and that I’d be waiting another four hours there for them.
I got a text from my fiancé: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll pick you up in the Batmobile.’
When I told the group WhatsApp I was still in A&E, another friend said: ‘At least by the time you’re seen it’ll be night so you can just fly home.’ Another asked if I’d stopped seeing myself in mirror and gone off garlic.
I waited for five hours, feeling embarrassed in an overstretched London hospital that maybe I was overreacting, before giving up and paying for a £60 private appointment at a travel clinic.
By the time I did eventually get home that night (via Tube), I felt vindicated that my fears had been correct.
The nurse at the travel clinic put me on a course of four post-exposure rabies vaccinations, spaced out over 21 days, and posted them to my GP surgery.
‘Call your doctor first thing and make sure they give you all the vaccines on time,’ she warned. When I arrived for my second jab a couple of days later, the GP gave me a now very familiar smile of bemusement.
Clearly very little is known about bat bites and scratches in the UK, even among medical professionals, but understandably they’re taken extremely seriously.
In 2002, a man who contracted rabies after being bitten by a bat in Scotland died – the first case in Britain for 100 years. Despite there being tens of thousands of rabies cases each year worldwide, cases occurring in the UK are predominantly acquired abroad, usually through dog bites.
I missed several calls overnight from the hospital, perhaps when they realised they shouldn’t have unleashed a potential rabies patient into the world.
I then got a call from the Hospital of Tropical Diseases in central London – presumably Chelsea and Westminster had passed on my details – telling me I should have been immediately referred to them. If only I had known I was round the corner from one of the world’s top centres for tropical medicine and infectious diseases, it could have saved me an afternoon in A&E (and 60 quid).
But there is one silver lining.
‘You’re super-immune now!’ joked the nurse after my final jab.
‘You’ll never need a rabies vaccine again.’
Forget my upcoming Italian honeymoon, I’m all set for Gotham City now.
