Aug 25, 2023 3 min read

Those of us who were children in the 1960s worried about some things that loomed in our imaginations: one was being stuck in quicksand, the other was the dangers of swallowing bubble gum, which neighborhood legend said would take 10 years to digest. We also knew not to step on sidewalk cracks, and never, ever to kill a cricket that’s living in the basement, as both would bring bad luck.

And the other worry was about rabies. Even as a 6-year-old, I knew enough about that unlikely danger to hold a frightening mental image of painful shots into the stomach with needles thick as bananas.

Quicksand turned out to be not much of a threat to those of us in Finleyville, and I’m sure I swallowed plenty of gum and nothing bad happened.

But a couple of weeks ago I had a minor rabies scare. While in my backyard, a neighbor’s small, yippy dog was off-leash and ran toward me. As I reached to it, it snapped and bit me in the middle finger of my left hand.

“He got you all the way through the nail,” said the doctor at the urgent care center. After a tetanus shot and strong antibiotics, I was ordered to show them the dog’s rabies vaccine by end of the day.

“If you don’t have it,” said the doctor, “you’ll have to go to the ER to start the rabies shots.”

Several long hours would pass before the dog owner brought the vaccine records, and in that time I thought first about my bad luck and second, about the friends I’ve known who’ve had to get the shots.

Years ago, my neighbor was driving to work when a bat flew out of her handbag and proceeded to fly around her head, pooping everywhere. Because bats are known to carry rabies, my friend had to get the shots as a precaution.

And last summer, another friend got the shots after a dog bite. He was at an outdoor event and made the very honest mistake of petting a dog that a man and his wife had brought. My friend went into the restroom to wash his bitten hand, and returned to find that the couple and the dog had fled. Despite my friend’s public pleas on social media, the family never acknowledged or came forward with the vaccine proof, and my friend spent the next several weeks going back and forth to the ER to get the shots. They were expensive and the process was time-consuming.

I didn’t have to get the shots for my own bite, thank goodness, but geez that injury hurt. For two weeks I couldn’t practice piano or guitar – or type. It was the bite that caused me to miss this column in mid-July because it happened the morning of my deadline. To add insult to injury, the dog’s owner suggested that if I wanted the vaccine records, I should call the veterinarian myself. I pushed back on that, and a few hours later she brought the records.

Maybe we kids were right to fret about rabies back in the day. In the ’60s, the treatment was 23 shots in the stomach. Had I needed the shots last month, it would have been just seven, and in the arm, not the stomach.

The finger has mostly healed now, although the nail just doesn’t look right. It’s bumpy and broken, a reminder of some rotten luck – and a reminder that things can always be worse.