Category Archives: Adventures at Home

The other night, I woke up at 2:30 in the morning to what I thought was more bat chirping. You know how there’s a spectrum between asleep and awake (see figure 1.0) and how you accelerate rapidly along that spectrum once your brain registers real world trouble? (I have a theory that true adrenaline rushes don’t happen during sleep. But they can happen at even the slightest amount of awake-ness. And once they do, you travel the rest of that spectrum disturbingly fast. Hence the phrase “rude awakening.” See figure 1.1)

Figure 1.0

Figure 1.1

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I awoke to a high-pitched chirping and a cat’s aggressive “Raow!” last night, sure the two cats had caught a mouse and were torturing it. But the “Raow” had me a little baffled: as far as I know, mice are more like toys than hiss-inducing adversaries. Still, once I found a flashlight and tiptoed carefully out of the bedroom, I kept my eyes glued to the floor and any sudden movements. The cats scattered when I got into what we call the red room of our house, which is kind of like a foyer (pardon my French). I turned on the light and combed the area for signs of a crippled rodent. But then something fluttered silently through the air, nearly colliding with my face. I hit the deck. My heart rate shot up about 50 beats per minute. Bat!

Now at the cats’ level, I could see them tracking the movements of the animal like spectators at a tennis match. I opened the front door (which leads to a porch) and then crawled across the floor and closed the bedroom and bathroom doors. The bat circled the red room and then flew into the guest bedroom since I hadn’t yet closed that door.

I racked my brain for methods of directing it toward the porch and remembered the old tennis ball trick. If you’re ever outside at dusk, when the bats are flying around your yard eating bugs (at a very safe height of 30 feet in the air or so), you can throw a ball up there and watch them follow its descent a ways before deciding it’s not edible and fluttering back upwards.

We had several tennis balls on the porch, so I crawled out there and grabbed four of them. Back in the red room, I kept low and tried lobbing some tennis balls just inside the doorway of the guest bedroom. Each ball hit the floor with a thump and bounced to a dead, impotent stop.

I whispered the F word.
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Here’s the thing: this is Wisconsin. We don’t have black widows or brown recluse spiders. No scorpions. No fang-toothed jellyfish. Mosquitos are a pain in the rear, but when it comes to little things that bite you, this is a pretty good place to be.

I guess various bees and hornets can pack a wallop, especially for those of us who might be allergic to them. But it’s pretty rare that the bee/wasp types make it into your home undetected.

So I’m baffled about what it is that bit me last Friday night. But something did. Right in the crook of my left arm. While I slept.

I woke up with a quarter-sized irritation which grew in size throughout the day. It itched and it was hot; icing it helped alleviate some of the minor pain.

The next morning, though, I woke up with something that had grown much more sinister. The swelling extended over most of my arm, and the quarter sized irritation from the previous morning was now a raw, red oval like no other bite I’d ever had.

To make matters worse, later in the morning, I noticed a red streak running up my arm. When the Urgent Care nurse I called heard about the red streak, she asked no more questions. “Yeah, let’s make you an appointment,” she said. Red streaks indicate an infection, which can be big trouble if it gets to your heart, right? And so I went into the clinic and got a prescription for antibiotics.

The whole thing got me thinking, though. Without proper treatment — or, say, in the pre-antibiotics years — could the bite have been fatal? Even here in insect-innocuous Wisconsin? My doctor wife says probably not but possibly. Of course, she’s not a medical doctor . . .

You know how they say that people look like their dogs? I don’t mind that, cuz I’ve got a good looking dog. Here she is:

But if you were to say the same about me and my cat, I might take offense: