Tales from the REAL O.C. - Rabies!
- posted by Legal Bitch @ 9:17 AM | Permanent Link

All kids love animals, and I was no exception. Much to my parents chagrin, when I was around 8 years old, I took to the habit of feeding stray cats at our back steps. I would save some of my allowance and walk down the road to the local convenience store to buy cat food for my feline friends. I didn't have too many human ones back then. I had 3 regular kitties, a gray tabby named Tyrone, a calico named Sugar, and a mangy ass brown cat named Turd (and sometimes 'Tard, as he wasn't a very bright animal). I'd feed them, pet them a little, and go about my business. My dad objected to this new habit of mine, as he said "With all these damn cats running around our house the neighbors might start thinking we're weird or something." Like nothing else in our household would ever give them that idea...

So everything was fine until one day, this pretty, fluffy orange kitty came to eat with the others. It seemed perfectly nice, and allowed me to pet it gently for a few seconds before it went snout down in the food bowl. He finished eating, turned around, and ferociously bit down into my right arm, biting and scratching the living crap out of me. I kicked the cat off me and ran into my house, arm bleeding from 4 big puncture wounds and several scratches. My mom freaked, and off to the hospital we went.

Since it was a "wild animal" attack, the emergency room technician told us we had something like 2 weeks to find the wild animal before I would have to be vaccinated for rabies. He also gave me a graphic description of how the virus would travel to my brain, eventually affecting my nerve centers and traveling to my salivary gland, causing me to foam at the mouth, go crazy and eventually go into a coma and die. Rock on!

So for the next week we drove to almost every house in the area looking for this cat. My brother would torment me by running around the house with toothpaste foam around his mouth and convulsing wildly on the floor, or hissing at me like a cat every time I'd round a corner. I told him I'd bite his ass first when I turned rabid. Unfortunately for me, we did not find the animal.

Back in 1984 when this occurred, medical science in the rabies field wasn't very advanced. The rabies vaccination involved sticking me in the muscle of my stomach with several long, pointy needles. And it's not just one shot. It's a series of several shots over the course of a week. I had never experienced pain like this (it was much worse that the golf club in the eye a few years earlier). Getting rabies had to have been less painful that the antidote for it. Worse yet, people were still watching me like a hawk to see if I was going to start foaming at the mouth or stop taking showers (rabies causes hydrophobia). I missed a bunch of school and kids avoided me like the plague. Children are cruel and duplicitous. Hell, at least cats are honest about trying to mess you up and do it outright.

The epligoue is that about a month later, when I was out trick or treating with my mom, we found that damn cat. It belonged to someone who lived about 8 miles down Hwy 78 from our house. How the hell it got to my house I'll never know (and how we missed it on our exhaustive search beats me). I screamed, pelted the cat with candy corn and ran to the car for safety. I still have 2 round white scars from it's teeth on the inside of my right arm, and a nice long scar going down the side of my right hand. That's why you can't trust cats - they'll fuck you up! (and perhaps give you rabies).