The Harrowing Tale of the Gym Rat Bat

Photo by Julia Sky (juliasky.art)

Part 1 – Morning

It started with cheesecake and ended with rabies.

In August of 2015, my family and I went on an all-inclusive cruise to Alaska. We saw black bears, went dog sledding, drank a lot of alcohol, and ended every night with cheesecake—so much cheesecake—because it was free, and it was cheesecake. The day after coming home to New Jersey, my DNA 70 percent cheesecake, I went to the gym for my monthly workout. After I finished, I stopped at the wall of hooks where members place their car keys, reached up to grab mine, saw something in the corner of my eye, and froze. 

            There was a furball on the floor.

          Since I am terrible at judging distances, I’d say that if you laid two Kevin Harts on the ground from head to toe, that’s how far away the furball was from me, except it was more like the shape of a toad than a ball. Its body was round but thinner where its face was, if it even had a face.

At first, I thought it was a prank: a toy planted by the gang of retired male seniors. They looked like a group with a sense of humor. Every day, the seniors entered the gym with their tube socks and shorts pulled up to their breast bones before standing around for hours pumping cups of coffee instead of weights.

           I inched closer to the furball. It was not a prank.      

          “Ohmahgawd!” I yelled, covering my mouth with my hands. The front desk employees continued to chat while other members walked past without pause. I went to the counter where a worker finally asked if she could help me. 

I pointed. “Is that a bat?”

        A bat. At the gym. Chillin’ on the floor like it was checking out babes while waiting for an occupied machine to open up. 

“Oh, is it?” the employee asked. She leaned over the counter and squinted. “Oh, so that’s what happened to the bat from the locker room.” She tapped a male employee on the back. He hopped over the counter to get a closer look.

The woman at the desk turned back to me. “We think someone left the front door open yesterday.” 

         I didn’t care. Outside of a zoo or cave, bats are interlopers. They may have every animal right to fly through the sky and live in whatever tree or space they’re indigenous to, but most people aren’t eager to share their homes with rabies-producing, blood-sucking villains. You can’t tie a leash around a bat. You don’t feed them scraps of steak from the table or cuddle with them while binging Netflix. You run from bats. You run because they come at you. They come for you.

Or, sometimes, they lie limp, leaving you unsure if their soul has already left their body to storm the gates of hell.

My sister Kiki can tell you all about the dangers of flaccid bats, because only a few years earlier, she had found what she thought was a used teabag next to her sink. When it hissed, her landlord confirmed it was a dying bat. She considered getting rabies shots, but her doctor said she should only get them if she had woken up with the bat in her room, or if she had been noticeably bitten. Why? Because according to the American College of Emergency Physicians, “The most common bats in the United States, the silver-haired and eastern pipistrelle bats, weigh a third of an ounce or less and have tiny teeth. A person could potentially mistake their bites for a thorn prick, a spider bite, or a bee sting.” When yet another bat flew into her apartment via the AC unit, she went to the ER and got the shots.

In conclusion, bats are crazy motherfuckers. I, too, am a crazy motherfucker. At least I feel that way sometimes. Besides having a very normal fear of rabid rodents, I have generalized anxiety disorder, or as my husband and I like to call it, “the cray crays.” It’s a mental illness that, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, affects more than six million adults. I’m not unique. But if you live with anxiety, or know someone who does, you know this one fact to be true: Anxiety is an absurd dick. 

If Anxiety’s never touched you―never made you feel nauseous or faint, like your heart is pounding hard enough to make your shirt twitch―then you might not know what it’s like to have a dark and irrational thought rise in your mind like a balloon you cannot pop. A dark and irrational thought is something like, “I have a bad headache, so it must be a brain tumor,” or “My husband’s acting weird, so he must be in love with someone else.” These thoughts are relentless and come at you fast, like a baseball from a pitching machine, and they’re often accompanied by horrible images. One minute, you’re driving to work. The next, you’re picturing every possible way you could get into a car accident or checking your phone at every stop light to make sure there’s nothing in the news about a mass shooting at the middle school your kids attend. With Anxiety, you look down at a mole on the bottom of your shin, flashback to that severe sunburn from senior year of high school, and diagnose yourself with melanoma, because everything—everything—is cancer.

            The first time I remember feeling anxious was in the summer of 2002. Amidst the excitement of getting accepted into my dream college in Boston and long summer nights spent with family and friends, all I could think about was moving five hours from New Jersey, my home for 18 years. Why had I applied to a school so far from home? Why would I leave a life that had been so good to me? Too afraid of my parents’ anger and disappointment to tell them I no longer wanted to go away to school, I let the worry build until I couldn’t contain it anymore. The night before I moved in, I told my mom how I felt. Even then I whispered it. By that point, Anxiety had convinced me that spending four years away from home would lead to spending the rest of my life in Boston, where I would grow old and die. I am not exaggerating. Like a math equation, I believed that: 4 years + Boston = death.  Mom called it “normal first-day jitters” and moved me into my dorm the next day, where I cried myself to sleep almost every night. I finished out the year in Boston and transferred to Rutgers the following year. Despite moving home, Anxiety remained.

            Thirteen years later, there I was, dealing with the monstrosity on the gym floor.

            Anxiety said we were all in danger of contracting rabies, or, at the very least, someone was going to get bitten. I needed an employee to poke it to see if it was dead, throw her arms in the air, scream “Bat!” and lead the rest of us (women and children first) in a mass exodus. Either that or find a gun and shoot it. But the workers did nothing. Maybe danger had never entered their minds. I couldn’t get past the bat, though. Literally. My keys were still hanging on the rack right above it.

 “Are you. . . going to . . . move the bat?” I asked the worker. “Or, like, put a trash can over it, or something?”

         The manager emerged from her office and stood next to me with her hands on her hips. “Oh geez,” she said.

         “Listen, I want to leave,” I said, “but the bat is right by my keys.”

         She shrugged. “You can leave.”

         “No, because it’s by my keys.”

She stared at me, emotionless, almost lifeless, just like the bat.

“And I’m . . . afraid of it,” I said. 

With an almost audible eye roll, the manager stepped over the bat, grabbed my keys, and plopped them into my hand. I ran to my car relieved but also confused.  Bats carry rabies, right? Rabies is an actual disease—a deadly one I could almost certainly recall learning about in elementary school. This was textbook knowledge, a fact Anxiety didn’t invent. So why was I the only one afraid?

         I called Kiki and told her what had happened. 

         “Oh God,” she said.  “Please don’t tell Mom.” 

         Mom—who had been on the Alaskan cruise. Mom—who, post-cruise, spent a few extra days of vacation in Seattle with her boyfriend. Mom—who I was supposed to pick up later that evening from the Philadelphia airport.

         Mom—the OG of anxiety.

***

The genesis of Mom’s anxiety is a mystery. In the past, when I’ve asked her, “Why are you the way that you are?” she accused me of trying to analyze her and reminded me that she hates to be analyzed. I, however, cannot not analyze, overanalyze, and revisit past analyzations, so I called her while burning dinner one night.

         “Were you anxious as a child?”

         I expected her to say yes, that her chaotic family life with six siblings, her mother’s suicide attempts, or our family’s history of mental illness led to anxiety in her early years.

         “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

         It wasn’t until her twenties, she said, when she started having what she remembers as real panic attacks. She gave no details, told no stories, and rushed me off the phone. 

         My parents’ marriage ended before my sister and I turned five, and although my mom had a boyfriend when I was in elementary school, she became sort of a happy recluse after they broke up—content with sitting on the couch, watching TV, and reading the newspaper. She would leave the house, of course, but she wasn’t eager to socialize with people she didn’t know well. When she did go out, she’d sometimes come home early, feeling too awkward to make small talk with acquaintances.

         Okay weirdo, I’d think. She could have talked with them about current events, politics, if Ross and Rachel were on a break (it was the 90s!). But to feel so uncomfortable she’d leave?  What a silly overreaction. When I went to college, though, I got it—the need to flee, the yearning for home. Yet when I was away, my mom seemed unable to tap into her past dread and relate to mine.

         “Stick it out,” she’d say. “You’re stronger than this.”

         Had she been cured?

         It wasn’t until years after college, during a walk around her neighborhood, that I confirmed the truth. Mom had tripped on an uneven piece of sidewalk and skated face-first like Nancy Kerrigan across the cement. During her exam at Urgent Care, she vocalized concern that her high blood pressure might cause a stroke like the one she had had a decade earlier, mini in size but big in its trauma. She started to feel light-headed, and as she panicked, Anxiety stepped out from behind her and waved to me. I knew then that she and I were comrades fighting the same battle.

         Today, when her worries overtake her, she clicks her nails, snaps at us, or rocks back and forth in whatever chair she’s in. New triggers include the fear of being late for any plans she has made, house fires, winning the lottery (“What if someone kidnaps my kids and holds them for ransom?!”), mice/gerbils/hamsters (“They’re all the same!”), and, of course, bats. After my sister’s trip to the ER, Mom did a lot of research, and what did she learn? Bats can make their bodies small enough to squeeze through almost any sized hole, slat in the wall, or opening under closed doors. Since Mom’s house, like any house, has holes, slats, and openings, Anxiety told her that she, too, would eventually be attacked by an army of bats.

         Which is why, in the gym parking lot on that fateful day, while on the phone with my sister, I did not confess that I had already called Mom and told her The Harrowing Tale of the Gym Rat Bat.

Part 2 –Afternoon 

Mom had a pinball injury.

This was the first of two traumas she revealed to my husband and me as we drove her home from the airport. It was evening, hours after I had encountered The Enemy. Mom was rubbing her wrists, her silver bangles clanging like church bells as she told us how playing pinball in a random Seattle bar had caused her some soreness.

          “From playing pinball. Pinball! Isn’t that weird?” Mom asked.

It was weird since she had never, in the 32 years since birthing me, mentioned playing pinball before. But ever since she started dating Rich ten years ago, she had added several layers to her personality, like “Craft Beer Drinker,” “Motorcycle Passenger,” and, as of that day, “Pinball Wizard.”

“Oh, and you know what else is weird?” she asked. “I woke up in the middle of the night with blood all over my face.” 

         “Blood?” my husband and I repeated.

         “Blood,” Mom said. “A tiny cut on my nose . . . and blood.”

         “From what?”

“When I got up this morning, I noticed a dark spot on my pillow. I went into the bathroom, and there was blood all over,” she said, circling her hand around her face.

         “What do you think it was?” my husband asked, playing the part of good son-in-law.

         Mom explained how the night before, they had left the window slightly open while sleeping. She stopped her story there, and I could almost see the ellipses dangling off her lips.  My husband’s face said he didn’t understand the significance of this seemingly nothing-of-a-story, but I knew what my mother was implying. The open window—the dot-sized wound—my tale of the gym rat bat from earlier that day. She thought an intruder did this to her. A little winged intruder. 

Part 3 – Night 

Around ten o’clock that night, hours after we dropped her at home, Mom called and I could almost hear her heart banging like a drum through the phone. I had been waiting for this call since she told us about the mysterious blood on her face and the nick on her nose.  

“You think a bat bit you, don’t you?” I asked her.  “Is this because of the gym story I told you?!”

Silence.

“Mom, a bat didn’t bite you.”

        “But how do you know it didn’t?” she asked.

        “Just because I saw a bat today doesn’t mean one attacked you across the country. Did you even see a bat in your room? Was there any evidence of a bat?” I asked, although we both knew that evidence didn’t matter. Anxiety opened a filing cabinet in Mom’s brain, pulled out her bat research, and pointed to her notes. Some people can’t feel a bat bite when they’re sleeping, Anxiety’s notes said. You might have rabies. You might die.

I asked her what she wanted to do.  She said she didn’t know, but I knew what she wanted deep down, which is what most of us over-worriers want: to be reassured, especially by a professional, that everything will be okay. That we aren’t going to die. That the people we love aren’t going to die. We want impossible reassurances.

I offered to take her to the Emergency Room like any irrational daughter would do for her irrational mother, and Mom accepted. We got to the ER in about twenty minutes, a drive my husband offered to take with us, which was nice but unnecessary. I didn’t need him trying to talk sense into Mom, because anxious people are acutely aware of how ridiculous they are and don’t need rational-minded folks to reiterate this. 

         “So, you’ve been bitten by a bat?” the intake nurse asked as she looked up from behind her computer. 

My mom smiled and shook her head. “Well, no. I don’t know. Maybe?” she said, then laughed. The laughter was quick and nervous, but it was one of the only ways Mom could express what had her scared without scaring herself even more. For many, laughter is a worthy opponent of Anxiety. I laughed, too, hoping it made her feel more at ease. 

The nurse rolled her chair away from her desk and sat back.  She peeked over the top of her glasses to get a better look at my mother, perhaps inspecting her for any obvious injuries or foaming at the mouth.

“You can’t always tell, right?” I asked. “Their bites are hard to feel. Right?” I told the abridged version of Mom’s hotel nightmare and waited for the nurse to kick us out. Instead, she took my mother’s insurance card and told us to have a seat.

The waiting room was empty, which seemed unusual for an Emergency Room. I had been to the ER four times in my life: once when I was six and broke my arm roller skating; once after I had been in a car accident; once when my husband had shingles; and once when he had been bitten by an octopus. Yes, you read that right. An octopus.  

The sound of Mom click-clicking her nails and her repeated mumblings about how her blood pressure would read high because she was nervous caused me to feel anxious myself. My body had absorbed her feelings like a paper towel soaking up a spill. 

The best I could do was get her a cup of tea. Tea often soothes her, and helping others soothes me, so escaping to the hospital’s Starbucks was a welcomed diversion. When I returned to the waiting room, Mom was sitting in a chair across from a nurse who was taking her blood pressure. It was high, just like Mom had feared. This excited Anxiety. It gained strength from the numbers like a spinach-guzzling Popeye.

I was frustrated, not just because Anxiety was winning, but because Mom’s blood pressure, which in the past has been high, had been lower in recent months. I worried she could have another stroke, which scared me more than rabies. I pictured her face resembling a Picasso portrait as the muscles slackened right in front of me, her speech mumbled and her eyes full of confusion, pleading for help.  My stomach cramped. I had to go to the bathroom, which is my body’s reaction to panic. The nurse reassured us that patients tend to have higher blood pressure when they’re in the hospital and scared, which made me feel a little less like shitting my pants and crying. 

“It’s a good thing you came in,” the nurse said after we explained why we were in the ER.  She justified our visit, and therefore justified our worry, which can be both helpful and harmful to chronic worriers.  “If you have been bitten and don’t get the shots, and the animal did carry rabies, you wouldn’t see symptoms for about a month, and once you see the signs . . .”

I held my breath.

“ . . . it’s too late.”

Anxiety knocked on my brain to get my attention and leaned forward—the bastard was too excited to sit back and relax! It turned on a memory and cues up an old episode of Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman. In that episode, Dr. Quinn’s daughter-in-law gets bitten by a rabid dog and dies. I laughed in the ER just like my sister and I had laughed when we watched the episode as kids. It was the only thing I could do in the face of death.

  I tried not to let my Mom hear. I didn’t want her to think I was laughing at her. Laughter’s contagiousness wouldn’t help her. She relied more on exercise, hugging her kids (my hug, given to her when she got off the plane, had proven itself impotent), avoiding the news, and looking at the ocean (an hour away) to calm herself. Unfortunately, that night, her go-to tricks were unavailable or useless. 

Soon, the doctor was ready to see her. Mom’s room was white and stark except for a counter with a sink and cabinets, a large bed, a chair, and a TV. There were several medical instruments attached to the wall behind the bed, but I didn’t look at them too long. I was a recovering Grey’s Anatomy addict who quit watching to spare myself the panic attacks; I was aware of these instruments and their uses. 

Mom shivered on the bed. When I handed her the tea, still hot, she looked at me like a child looks at her mother, waiting for me to tell her everything would be okay. But I was afraid it wouldn’t be okay. Maybe this was The Real Deal—not a false alarm, not a drill, but IT—the Big Goodbye I had been dreading since childhood. I didn’t want her to know that I was scared, so I said she was going to be fine, rubbed her shoulder, and turned on the television.

Minutes later, her doctor threw open the curtain so enthusiastically that I half expected him to yell “SURPRISE!” He skimmed Mom’s chart, looked at her, and said nothing.  Anxiety waited with bated breath for the doctor to scream “CODE BLUE” and stab my mom in the heart with a needle, but instead the doctor sat on a stool, crossed a leg over his knee, and casually asked about the bat in her room.

Except there was no bat.

Mom told the story for what felt like the hundredth time (and the last time I could bear to hear it), and the doctor—who was probably trained on how to act like a professional and hide a smile—listened with a stoic expression. 

“So, there was no bat, and no evidence of a bat,” he said.

Mom pointed to the dot on her nose.

“Besides your cut,” he added, pulling out a small flashlight from his jacket pocket and shining it on her face.  “Let me take a look at that.” 

He stared fiercely at the dot and studied it. He got himself so close that his nose almost touched hers and then circled her like a moon orbiting a planet, examining the dot from all angles. It seemed, to me at least, that this was all for show, and the doctor was pretending for the sole purpose of comforting a crazy person.  

The verdict? She was probably fine.   

The doctor explained how superficial wounds can sometimes bleed a lot, and that although my mother had a tiny cut on her nose, it could have come from scratching an itch, bumping her face with one of her rings, or a bug bite.  He didn’t believe the cut was from a bat. Mom challenged him. How could he be sure?

“I can’t be 100% sure, but I have given rabies shots hundreds of times,” he said. “And in all those times, I have never given a shot without some evidence of a bat. Never. So, I can’t in good conscience recommend one for you tonight.”

Mom nodded and stared at her hands in her lap, the disappointment smeared like butter across her face. I couldn’t tell if it was because of the anticlimactic end to an exciting night, because she felt silly, or because she still believed she might only have a month left to live.

“Look,” the doctor said.  “It’s not like you saw a bat.  If you had seen one, that’s a different story.”

I jumped off my chair and threw my hands in the air in a “wait, wait, wait, hoooooold on” gesture. “I SAW A BAT AT THE GYM TODAY. IT WAS NEAR ME. THIS CLOSE,” I said, then positioned myself beside the doctor. “Dead or alive, I don’t know, but could that have mattered? How close it was? If it was breathing? Do I need rabies shots, too?!”

Mom’s head darted from me to the doctor as if watching a tennis match. 

  The doctor blinked. 

I was convinced we would all be dead within a month and that my story would make it into the newspapers, maybe even on Dateline.

“No one needs rabies shots,” the doctor said. “You didn’t touch it, right?”

“Right.”

“Then sorry,” he said, laughing.  “My advice is to not seek medical treatment at this time. I can say with almost 100 percent certainty that you—both of you—are fine.”

It’s the word “almost” that can make an anxious person feel panicky. We try to ignore words like these— “almost,” “maybe,” and “probably”—because we think and think and think about them until they become obsessions. “Almost” is not a guarantee that everything will be okay. It’s not a promise. At best, it’s a guess. A gut feeling. Not foolproof. Not safe. So, for this reason, although my mom and I left the hospital shotless, I didn’t feel any better than when we had arrived. What if the doctor was wrong? What if, however it happened, a bat did enter my mom’s hotel room and nip her on the nose? It would have been too late to do anything. Could I have lived with knowing we hadn’t put up more of a fight? 

***

For the next month, I stayed vigilant and waited for my mom to have a headache, forget our names, lash out for unknown reasons, and, of course, foam at the mouth. But nothing happened. When a month went by, I felt safe enough to admit Mom might be okay and spent the next few weeks reprogramming my mind back to a healthy state.

To battle my intrusive thoughts, I’ve learned some tricks that others might find helpful as well. Sleep helps. It stops the hamster wheel of dark thoughts from spinning in your mind.  Talking to others about my fears, writing about them, saying them out loud and releasing them up to God or into the universe for a higher power to worry about also helps. Sometimes it’s as simple as reminding myself that all the worrying won’t stop the bad things from happening. As my therapist says, “You can choose to be debilitated by the fear, or you can choose to go out and live your life despite it.”

Out I went, back to the gym. The crusty carpets, the electric purple walls, and the sun-slapped lady in an ‘80s aerobics-era leotard stretching too close to the muscled gentleman beside her were right where I had left them. All seemed normal—not a bat to be seen—so I exercised and left, unharmed.

Ten years later, anxiety still lives within me, a squatter I may never be able to evict—my own little winged intruder. On the days I struggle to quiet the whispers of worry, I live my life anyway. I go to the gym, even though a bat could be sharpening its fangs, waiting for me. I attend concerts, even when I’m afraid a gunman may be lurking in the crowd. And I still eat cheesecake, regardless of my doctor’s warnings that I am “pre-diabetic.” Anxiety won’t win that one, though. It’s freaking cheesecake, after all.