Rabies Was Not on My Radar

This week, I have been ruminating a lot about worst-case scenarios.

Chris and I took a short drive one day to go on a hike, and the thought popped into my head:

What if we get in a car accident and die while the boys are at school, and they are orphaned? How soon can my parents get here? Do they have their numbers at the school? Should I add international people to the emergency contact list?

That’s a fun intrusive thought.

I also cannot stop imagining how hard it would be to navigate a serious medical crisis here. There is no “Press one for English” when you call the doctor’s office.

I tried to make an appointment for myself to be able to continue getting medications I take for anxiety/depression, and I ended up in tears because I was too overwhelmed to make the phone call in Spanish. If you know me, you probably already know I’ve struggled with anxiety and depression on and off, and I’m very open to talking about my experiences. But I had worked very hard to get to a place where I didn’t need them a while ago, and it felt good. When you are struggling, sometimes making the decision to use meds again feels like a huge obstacle. It feels like giving up. And it can feel like a personal failure. As much as I know and truly believe it is not a moral failing to need medicine to survive, I struggle with needing it.

So ultimately, I booked an appointment with an English-speaking doctor instead. They are a private practice that doesn’t take my insurance, so ideally in the long term I will be brave and figure out how to navigate one that does. But for right now, I really need to meet with someone so I can continue feeling some semblance of safety.

This idea of safety is something my brain cannot let go of lately. Why is it so hard for me to feel safe? Yes, I’m in a foreign country and I do not speak the language, but translation devices exist and many people do speak English, and I’m an intelligent person who can handle many types of situations. So, why is my brain going off on tangents in attempts to prepare me for worst-case scenarios?

Perhaps it’s because the last time I allowed myself to relax, I was awoken by a bat in my face.

Let me set the scene.

Our visa had been denied.

We were devastated. We returned to the United States and took turns staying with my parents and Chris’s parents. Our parents were angels. They tried to cheer us up, listened to our worries, and gave us a place to land during a time of uncertainty.

But as time went on and we heard nothing about our visas, we had to prepare for the likelihood that they simply weren’t going to get processed.

So we decided to return to Colorado. We wanted them to rejoin their sports teams and friend groups and have some sense of normalcy. We would continue homeschooling in the meantime. The problem was, we were actively trying to sell our house. It was empty of our belongings and full of staged furniture in a few rooms. So we decided to stay in Airbnbs and hotels (while still paying for our rental home in Spain!).

At first, we stayed in a long-term hotel after our four-day cross-country road trip. I got exactly zero hours of sleep each night. The people staying there were… interesting. The outside exit door opened and slammed constantly throughout the night. There was a huge crack underneath our door where I could see shadows of footsteps walking by.

We were a family of four in one room with a kitchenette and bathroom, trying to come up with some homeschool curriculum and create a rhythm to our days that would keep us out of the hotel room as much as possible. I microwaved broccoli for dinner one night, and we had to sleep with that smell for days. Chris and I were both very stressed, I was falling deeper into depression, and we were trying to keep it together in front of the kids. Also, there was no time we were not in front of the kids.

And then, finally, we got into an Airbnb for a month-long stay. We were over the moon. It was an old renovated farmhouse, but the furniture was beautiful, the beds were comfortable, and there was a full kitchen. We grocery shopped because we were looking forward to cooking real meals, and I made a batch of overnight chocolate chia seed pudding. The boys pulled out a game of dominoes and were hanging out nicely with each other. Chris and I felt like we could exhale for a moment.

I remember getting into my new Wal Mart yellow pajamas with sheep printed on them and climbing into bed. The bed had the BEST oversized, heavy comforter. Yesssssss! I pulled it up around me and told Chris that I felt like a little kid being tucked into bed. All cozy and safe.

And I remember thinking: Okay. We will be here for a while. We can figure things out. I drifted off to sleep.

And then I was awoken by a very loud, very close flapping sound. For a split second, I thought it was a flock of birds. An image of the messenger owls from Harry Potter flying out of the closet to my left popped into my head, dropping packages of passports stamped with visas. We got them!

The next second, I was more awake. And realized… wait, what? What was flapping directly in front of my face?

I woke Chris up. He turned on the light. I was bleary-eyed because I had taken out my contacts—which I also hadn’t done in a week, because I didn’t feel safe sleeping blind in that other hotel. I could tell from Chris’s posture first, and then his cursing second, that it was a bat. We had had one in our Boulder home the year before, unfortunately, so we were already familiar with the protocol.

We slammed the bedroom door shut and tried to figure out what to do. I was quickly on the phone with Airbnb, trying to get us a new place to stay for the night. “Can you please get a video or photo of the animal to verify?” “No. I am NOT going to try to get a photo of the bat to verify!”

Chris pried open the door to try to get his phone and car keys. The bat started flapping around his head like crazy. At this point, we had to wake up the boys. We got them into a room together, gathered our things, and somehow got everyone into the car so we could drive to a hotel. Chris tried one more time to get his car keys and phone, and he was successful. We loaded the boys into the car and headed to a hotel right next door to the previous hotel we had just escaped.

On the drive there, everyone was tense because our car had decided to develop some kind of broken metal scraping beneath the floorboard the previous day. We’re tired, we’re scared, and this minivan feels like it might rip apart at any second. It was like the scene from Little Miss Sunshine and the broken horn honking intermittently. We had planned to take it to the shop in the morning. Now, instead, we would be meeting animal control back at the Airbnb.

We got the boys settled into the new hotel at 3 a.m. and immediately started researching health insurance and rabies information. Since I had been asleep, and everyone else as well, and we didn’t know exactly where the bat had emerged from… if the bat were captured and found to have rabies, we would all need the series of vaccine shots.

If the bat escaped and could not be tested, we would have to decide whether to take the chance that none of us had been scratched or bitten. However, if you know anything about rabies, you know that once the symptoms develop, you 100% are going to die a horrible death. Which is a particularly fun thing to contemplate at 3:00 in the morning.

So there we were.

Two people in a hotel room in the middle of the night, googling rabies and health insurance open marketplace. I forgot to mention, we only had Spanish health insurance at this time. If we had activated COBRA, it would have cost us over $10,000 for ONE MONTH!

It was a horrible night. I don’t know how I slept at all.

In the morning, Chris met with a Boulder County sheriff, who easily trapped the bat and took it for testing. She even nicely held it for a photo so we could get our Airbnb refund. The Airbnb owners were mortified and felt terrible about the situation. To be fair, the house had been very clean, but it was an old farmhouse. We were just unlucky.

And now we were back to not having a long-term, stable place to stay.

This is why I’m having a hard time relaxing into a sense of safety. The bat encounter was scary, but it was also an identifiable problem. After 3 days, we found out that it did not, in fact, have rabies. But I still had the question of where we would be living next month. I still had questions about whether or not we’d get the chance at the life we were planning.

Again and again, we would reach a point where I thought, Okay. Maybe we can exhale now. And then something else would happen. So, yeah. I guess I am still recovering from all of that.

Maybe my brain isn’t actually trying to make me miserable. I think it is trying to keep me prepared. It learned that safety can disappear very quickly.

And in reality, what happened is that my illusion of control was shattered.

I had been operating under the belief that if I was responsible enough, prepared enough, and made enough of the “right” choices, I could keep myself and my kids safe. But I’ve never been truly in control of that. None of us are.

I think part of my job right now is to teach my brain and body that I don’t have to know what happens next in order to be safe right now. This is probably going to take a little while.

The first several nights in Spain, I woke up gasping for breath because I was dreaming about bats and rats surrounding me. (I had also seen my first rat, because we live in an urban area. I did not love that.)

For now, I will take my meds. I will walk many miles outside in the sunshine while checking off our various “getting settled in” chores. I will go to the gym (which we signed up for! All by ourselves! Using only Spanish!) and write one thing I am thankful for each night, or one win of the day, no matter how small.

And when I get into bed, I will pull the covers up around me and try to believe that I am safe to exhale.