Emily Klasson ’06 had a tougher transition to school this year than most students. She woke up in the middle of the night two weeks ago to find a bat fluttering around her in her Home Avenue house.
“I just woke up and it was in my room,” Klasson said. “I chased it all the way downstairs. It took a while.”
With the help of her three housemates, Klasson managed to draw the bat into the kitchen. Tired, they decided to shut the door and call Physical Plant in the morning. By morning the kitchen was empty and the bat was nowhere to be found. Taking care of the bat itself, however, was only the start of Klasson’s troubles.
“[My housemate] heard that if you come into any contact at all with a bat, you should get a rabies shot,” Klasson said. “I asked my mother and found out it was true. The next day, I called a Wesleyan doctor and he called the Center for Disease Control [CDC].”
The CDC recommends the rabies shot in all cases of possible contact because a bat’s bite is painless. Although most bats do not have rabies, a bat in a room that cannot fly or does not try to hide is more likely to have the disease, according to the CDC website. Since it is impossible to be certain that rabies was not transmitted without first testing the bat, the doctor called the Middlesex Hospital and arranged for Klasson to go to the emergency room.
“I had always believed that the rabies shots were some of the worst you had to get: intense, huge shots to the stomach,” Klasson said. “I found out it was just a normal shot. It’s a series of them. I got four shots that night in the hospital. I have to get one shot four more times over the next month. The reason I really did it was because rabies is 100 percent fatal.”
Klasson said that Physical Plant took measures to ensure that no more bats could enter the house. Thinking the bat may have entered through the attic, they fitted covers for interior heating grates. Damaged window screens were also temporarily repaired, and new ones have been custom-ordered. In the process, Physical Plant discovered that there was a family of squirrels living in the walls, which had entered through large holes in the house. The squirrels were removed and the holes plugged. Other minor repairs were completed to make certain that only paying students were living in the house.
“With an older house, like our wood frames, there is always the possibility that an animal might get into an attic, or the walls, or the house itself,” said Frances Koerting, director of residential life. “Physical Plant has been working with the residents of the house to try to eliminate any possible means of entry. I’m sure that encountering the bat was an extremely unpleasant and upsetting situation for the residents, and I have been so impressed by the way they have handled it.
”We’ve been very cautious since it happened,“ Klasson said. ”I don’t think we’re expecting anything to happen again.“
Leave a Reply