My family has generally only kept one pet at a time. This allows us to shower all of our love and adoration onto one lucky creature, and therefore allow it to live the most privileged life an outside pet can live. Girl, a black labrador retriever, was my first pet. She "ran away" to live with someone else when I was a little girl. When I was 7 years old, we were given a little gray tabby kitten, Tiger. Tiger was a mild mannered guy, very sweet with me and my sister. He was smart; he knew he had to be sweet to us because we fed him lots of food. He was not so sweet with the vets. He's the only cat I've ever heard of who had to get muzzled to go to the vet. He grew into a really, really, really fat cat. He weighed somewhere between 15 and 20 pounds, and he was predictably very lazy.
So on this August day, back in 2009, my family was spending one of the last weeks of summer together. We planned on taking a day trip to go out of town, but that morning we noticed that Tiger was breathing extremely heavily and very quickly. My mother measured his respiration rate, and it turned out to be like a million breaths per minute. Using our brilliant deductive skills, we figured out that something was wrong. But what? We had to take him to the vet. Mom gave me the task of getting some of our older towels to put in the cat carrier while she was outside making sure it was clean. This is when things started to get really, really dramatic.
I head to go outside to the carport, where my mother was waiting. As I shut the back door, I heard "RUN, CAROLYN! RUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNN!" I heard this awful, shrill, squeaky scream.
Little Sister, who was already outside, and I started running. Little Sister was holding our dying pet in her arms, and he was being bounced up and down while we gallop halfway up the driveway. I turned around, to figure out what I'm running from.
It's a bat. A BAT. In the middle of the day. And it had been trying to crawl into our home while I had opened the door to come outside. When I shut the door, I had closed it upon the bat's leg. That was when things started to happen in slow motion.
The screaming bat managed to wriggle itself free from the door. It started flying around in frantic circles and zigzags. I initially assumed it was only doing so because it was hurt. I'm sure getting its leg closed in a door did not feel very good. However, the bat saw me, or heard me, or smelled me, or something else equally scary, because it then started to fly at me. I began to run, because the bat was still flying very manically and was not actually zooming straight at my head at that particular moment. It was chasing me, though, and it chased me and Little Sister (still clinging to our freaked out, half-dead cat) all the way up our driveway, up the front sidewalk, and to the front porch.
Little Sister and I got inside the house, and shut the door. The bat kept flying around our house for half an hour or so, and even banged up against our windows.
Inside, we were all freaking out. Tiger was on the floor on his side, eyes wide and mouth open, gasping to avoid suffocation. Little Sister and I are practically in shock. Here's about what he looked like:
My mother was talking about all of us probably having rabies. The conversation went something like this: "blah blah blah Dead Cat blah blah Bat blah blah Rabies blah blah blah Was Anyone Bitten or Pooped On? blah blah blah Vet blah blah blah Can You Believe We Were Just Chased by a Bat???"
After around half an hour, we made our way outside again. We had to get Tiger to the vet, because unfortunately the jostling he received during our retreat was terrible for him. We packed him up and rushed him to the vet. He couldn't even meow by the time we got him there, and his nose was no longer pink. Essentially, we walked in, showed him to the vet, and suddenly the clinic from a small town veterinary clinic to an emergency surgery pet-saving wonderland. They were all like, "We need to get him into surgery, asap!" So they whisked him away. We got reports that went something like this, "We are having to slice open his belly; this is bad and he might die at any moment," and "He just died and we performed miracle kitty cat CPR on him and brought him back to life."
It was very dramatic.
Thankfully, Tiger did not die that day. He held on for a few weeks longer. If he had died that day, I think it would have been too much. I mean, really? I don't know if you can understand the fear of being chased by a potentially rabid, definitely angry, injured, manic bat in the middle of the day. I'm surprised I did not wet myself. That bat was bent on revenge. But then to have your only pet almost go to Kitty Cat Heaven on the same day? Dreadful.
