Chiroptophobia

I didn't think I was afraid of bats before I went to bed last night. Then, around 2am, something with claws landed directly on my head and woke me up. I bolted straight upright in bed, which was a mistake, because there was now a very freaked out bat flying in eccentric circles around my room. I quickly lay back down so it wouldn't hit me in the face and, after the initial shock wore off, made a duck and cover run for the door, all the while thinking, "Bats are the main vector of rabies. I'm going to get bitten and go insane." Clearly I am not at my most lucid at 2am after being violently awoken.

Of course, when I made this run for the door, I didn't give any thought to the fact that there was no way for the bat to get out of the house. I paced in the hallway for what seemed like a very long time, and eventually the bat landed somewhere in the vicinity of my closet. There was no chance that I could get back to sleep knowing that there was a bat in the room, even if it stayed put all night, so I decided to make a dash back into the room, grab my phone, and do what any scared girl would do in my situation. Call my dad. Luckily, it was only 11:30ish Portland time.

He very kindly didn't laugh at me too much and suggested I open the screen of my windows, grab a blanket, close my bedroom door, and go sleep downstairs and the bat would make its own way out of my room. Well, I fell asleep on the couch, and about an hour later was woken up again by fluttering noises. Turns out the bat had made its way out of my room, by somehow crawling under the door, and was now flying around downstairs. It ended up doing loops around the kitchen, and I now had absolutely no clue what to do with it, since there is nowhere downstairs to trap it and the doors all have springy screen doors that I can't leave open. So what did I do? Called my dad again. By now it was 1:30ish Portland time, but I was too freaked out to care.

While talking to him trying to figure out what to do, the bat left the kitchen, and flew upstairs. After a few minutes I heard a lot of bursts of extra loud fluttering, and then silence. And then another burst, and more silence. So I slowly crept up the stairs, fully expecting the bat to come flying at my face in the narrow stairwell. It didn't, and when I reached the top of the stairs, I discovered that the bat had got itself caught in the shower and kept flying into the shower curtain. So the first thing I did was close the bathroom door. Now I had a bat trapped in the bathroom, with no means of escape. That wasn't something that I wanted to deal with when I woke up in the morning, or leave for one of my roommates to discover (they were all gone for the night). So, with paternal encouragement, I opened the bathroom door, darted inside, closed the door behind me, pulled the window screen open, and then ran out of the bathroom, closing the door behind me. Fortunately the bat stayed in the shower. I made sure there were no cracks around the door that the bat could squeeze through, and then, after much reassurance, finally got back into bed.

I think it was 5am at this point. I tossed and turned for a long time, listening to imagined fluttering sounds. My alarm went off at 7:30 because I had to be in lab this morning (I don't like Saturday classes). So my calculations give me about 2-3 hours of real sleep. Not enough. When I woke up I really had to pee, but I spent several minutes listening at the bathroom door for signs of the bat. I didn't hear anything, so I went in. I still didn't see or hear it, so I poked at the shower curtain, hoping to scare it into movement if it was still there. Nothing. So I peeked into the shower and it looked like the bat was gone. There was much exhausted rejoicing.

I was like a zombie in lab, barely responding to anything, and when I got home I just collapsed in bed for an hour but the heat eventually woke me up. Now I'm trying to stay cool, but failing miserably. I think I might go for a bike ride. If I'm going to be overheating and sweating anyway, I might as well be getting exercise.