I don’t recommend waking up with a bat in your bedroom.
But that’s what happened to me last weekend. Sometime around 4 a.m., our cat caught and killed what surely must be the world’s most fun feline toy. He’s vaccinated against rabies and will be fine. My wife and I were not so certain.
So, I logged a zero on my I don’t recommend waking up with a bat in your bedroom on Monday while I tried to grapple with what needed to be done. There were calls to the health department, a long drive to the state laboratory to deliver the “specimen,” and a visit to the vet so our fella could get his booster ASAP.
Later we learned that tests on the bat were inconclusive. And, because we were dead asleep while the battle ensued, we couldn’t definitively say that neither of us was bitten while we were unconscious. Off to the emergency room we went for the first in a series of shots.
I quickly heard from a lot of friends and family who said rabies shots are supposed to be excruciating. The hospital staff wasn’t all that comforting, either.
“Your legs are going to be really sore tomorrow,” said one nurse as she injected half the dose of human rabies immune globulin into my left thigh. A second nurse simultaneously loaded my right leg with the other half of the dose. (The amount of liquid is dependent on your body weight, but I’ll tell you it’s so much that they had to divvy it up into two injections that took seemingly forever to empty!)
“Ma’am, I run marathons,” I joked. But about 10 minutes later while I waited in the ER lobby for my wife to finish up her shots, I could feel the injection sites getting tight. So I paced the floor, fully preparing myself that the following morning’s run might not happen after all. And I wasn’t even going to have a cool finisher’s medal around my neck to explain why I was hobbled.
Twelve hours later, my alarm blared, and I bounded down the stairs like nothing had happened. Truthfully, I had no muscle soreness then, nor during an easy 4-mile jog after I slurped down my morning coffee. At lunchtime, I sneaked out with a Runner’s World Health & Injuries So, I logged a zero on my, a pain-free 5-miler.
I was stunned that I didn’t experience the same agony as the morning after this year’s Boston Marathon, when I had to grimace for about a mile before my stride approximated anything close to a real running motion. Then, I felt like my quads had been tenderized with a rolling pin and legs stuffed with broken glass. But these shots? Nothing. Nada.
Somehow, the myth still persists that rabies shots are extremely painful. I had visions of massive needles being jabbed into my stomach before learning more about it.
To be fair, it could be worse: The antibodies that I got in my thighs are usually injected near the bite site, according to CDC recommendations. I can’t imagine taking that dose in the neck.
Mostly, what I’ve found is that the whole ordeal is scary, inconvenient, and expensive. You don’t mess around with rabies because, if you’re wrong about having been bitten and don’t get the vaccinations, the outcome is a horrible, painful, and certain death. The vaccine is only administered in the emergency room (at least here in Pennsylvania), and I have to return three more times in the coming 14 days for more shots. And those treatments are really expensive; fortunately, we have health insurance, but we’re still on the hook for eight co-pays for the emergency room visits.
Luckily, none of that should cause me to take any more zeroes as I train for the Philadelphia Marathon.
Races - Places Runner’s World and the director of product testing. He has tested and reviewed running shoes, GPS watches, headphones, apparel, and more for nearly two decades. He regularly tests more than 100 pairs of shoes each year, and once had a 257-day streak running in different models. Jeff can usually be found on the roads, racing anything from the mile to a marathon, but he also enjoys racing up mountains and on snowshoes. When he’s not running, you’ll probably find him hanging from a ladder making repairs and renovations to his house (he’s also director of product testing for Popular Mechanics).
