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September 19, 2004
Breaking News: Man Stalls Boston Traffic Chasing Squirrel; One Woman Reportedly Injured
File this under "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished": Last night we spent the better part of the evening waiting around in a hospital emergency room because Susanne got bit by a squirrel. How, you may ask?
It all started with me insisting that we spend a cold, rainy afternoon at the movies seeing The Bourne Supremacy, just to see if it was actually better than the first Bourne movie, as many critics had said. (It was.) The movie wrapped up just before 6pm, so we planned to walk home, feed the cats, then walk down to Jamaica Plain to go to an Ethiopian restaurant.
As we walked past the Landmark Center back to Brookline, Susanne and I noticed a young squirrel darting through traffic. We held our breath and cringed as it ran under two cars, clearly about to be smushed, then miraculously emerged unscathed. It reached the curb and tried to climb up, but it was too small, so it turned around, running frantically back into traffic.
Being the animal lovers we are, there was no way we could have kept walking and let the poor creature become another roadkill statistic, so I ran into the oncoming traffic and waved the cars to a stop. I then chased after the squirrel, trying to give it a bit of an instinctive push to jump over the curb. (How arrogant of me -- like the squirrel would be motivated to jump to safety more by me chasing it than a two-ton SUV.)
The squirrel was literally caught in a loop, running towards the curb, then cutting a U-turn to the left back into traffic, until reaching the next curb and making another left-handed turn. Meanwhile, I chased after it as cars honked and screeched to a halt, some ignoring both me and the squirrel and pressing forward down the road. Meanwhile, two other men joined my rescue effort: a middle-aged man who stood on one curb, trying to catch the squirrel each time I chased it his way, and a young Arab man who tossed me his jacket so I could try to trap it and pick it up safely.
I threw down his jacket several times, but the squirrel darted out each time. All of this went on for at least five minutes, as I ran in counterclockwise circles 20 or 30 times across the busy two-lane road, heaving in the cold air, praying I wouldn't pass out and crush the squirrel.
Eventually, the squirrel got as tired as I was, and three of us -- Susanne, the Arab man and I - cornered it. The next thing I knew I saw Susanne lurching upward, while the squirrel flew through the air into the grass in front of me. I chased it further into the grass so it would head away from the street, then turned to Susanne and our rescue partner. Susanne was clutching her hand, with a drop of blood running down her palm.
"He bit me," she said, examining her hand. Apparently, when we cornered the little beast, she grabbed it and tossed it; in the process, the squirrel curled around her hand, gave her a nip and sunk in its claws as a parting gift, leaving three pin-prick holes on her knuckles and a bloody gash on the inside of her hand.
We walked back to our apartment wondering what to do next. The chances of this young squirrel having rabies seemed remote, especially since it did its damnedest to keep away from us, but why take a chance? I called one of the local emergency rooms and asked a nurse if we should come in now, or make an appointment with her doctor for first thing Monday. The nurse suggested we come in immediately.
Susanne washed her hand while I fed the cats, then we walked across the Riverway to the Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center. The nurse at the triage desk was expecting us, and examined Susanne without too much of a wait. We then had to wait a little longer before being brought into a private examination room.
We waited in that uncomfortable room, with nothing but a gurney and a rotating stool to sit on, for the next three hours, until another nurse, resident and attending physician were able to see us. As time passed we got to know the guy in the room next to ours -- Keith, an incoming freshman at a local college, who cut his hand opening a can of soup at 3am the previous night, then closed it up with tape so he could go to bed. Poor guy eventually found out he'd have to come back several times over the next week because the wound had become infected and would require IV antibiotics and a hand surgeon. Perhaps it was an omen -- another hand injury, a preventable one at that. I cringed at the possibilities.
The nurse and doctors were all rather cynical about our good deed -- "That'll teach you from doing that again," said the resident. In the meantime, we waited and waited.
"I can't believe this," Susanne said at one point, shaking her head and grimacing.
"This feels like a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode," I replied.
"I can see Larry David's wife yelling at Larry to rescue the poor squirrel off the highway," Susanne replied, laughing.
By 10pm, the attending physician examined Susanne, bringing along a fascinating sheet of Massachusetts rabies data. For example, did you know that of the five alpaca bites reported in the last 10 years, none of them came back rabid, while the one chinchilla bite, sadly, came back with the Old Yeller Syndrome? Or that it's better to get bit by a muskrat, opossum, bison, chipmunk, llama, seal, porcupine, sheep or ferret -- none of which have tested positive for rabies -- than a cow, woodchuck, coyote, otter, pig, raccoon, skunk, bat or fox -- all of which have been linked to rabies cases? Even the four bear bites came back negative for rabies -- though I think if you've gotten bit by a bear, you've got bigger problems than rabies to worry about.
But the most important statistic we learned was this: of the 1,167 squirrels tested after biting humans in Massachusetts over a 10-year period, none had come back positive for rabies. Zero. Zip. Nada. So the attending physician gave us a copy of the data sheet as a consolation prize and sent us on our merry way, without giving Susanne even a bandage, let alone a rabies shot.
By now it was approaching 11pm and we still hadn't had dinner, so we persevered to go to the Ethiopian restaurant, where we enjoyed a small feast as a group of talkative Ethiopian men sat at the bar, drinking Cointreau while watching Florida play Tennessee. Not exactly the evening we'd expected.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at September 19, 2004 10:35 AM
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