I need to be told I'm being ridiculous. Rabies/ bats?

[Anxiouspotat0]

Hi.
So, I go abroad on friday for two weeks.
Yesterday I woke with a weird.mark on my hand. I google lensed it to be told it looks like a bat bite. I measured it and it is the right size. IGoogle of course recommended a full course of post rabies exposure vaccines as bats arre the only.animal in the UK that cam carry a rabies like virus.

Here's the thing. I walk the dogs of an evening. There are sometimes bats around flying overhead but I.am confident I would have noticed one stopping to land on my hand (apparently they don't bite mid flight and have to anchor theirselves). It's the hand I hold the dog lead with. To my knowledge (I am confident) one never got anywhere near close. Which leaves one flying in through a window and biting me in my sleep (google says you'd always find a bat in the room, there is 0 evidence of any bat) I also have dogs that bark if a spider farts so if a bat was in tbe room surely they' have woke me up.

I'm waiting for the GP to get back to me (111 told me to send them a photo) .Obviously rabies is 100% fatal and not something to mess with. BUT if I do the jabs which are 4 jabs over 28 days, I will have to either not go away (it is incredibly important to me, it isnt a regular.holiday and I can't reschedule it) or source 1/2 jabs in the US which insurance would not cover. Tens of tbousands of debt which I cannot afford. All on the slight chance a bat somehow entered my home, bit me, and left with0 trace, and when only 0.5% of tested bats even carry the virus even if it was a bat bite.

I don't even know if the NHS would recommend thr jabs given I was never directly near a bat or found a bat in a room, but I'm just stressed as hell, please be gentle. But I'm hoping to be told that you regular unanxious people would just assume a spider bite or anything else and go about their lives without worrying about rabies. I am a super anxious person as you can surely tell.

Thanks if you made it this far.

This is the rabies risk assessment:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rabies-post-exposure-prophylaxis-management-guidelines/rabies-summary-of-risk-assessment-and-treatment

You are probably in Category 2 for Bats, if not Category 1.

Then it says the UK is low risk for Bats:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rabies-risks-by-country/rabies-risks-in-terrestrial-animals-by-country#bats

That would put you in either Green, no treatment, or Amber, treatment.

The treatment is then Day 0, 3, 7 and 21.

So you'd only need Day 7 in the US, if you needed it at all. So you might only need a single dose. Your travel insurance might cover this as it would probably be less than covering cancelling the whole trip?

It looks like e.g. in a travel clinic in New York you're talking circa $550, if it was required, rather than £000s, so that might be arrangeable?

I agree with PP, you are worrying excessively about something that does not need worrying about. You have a small mark on your hand, there is no reason to think it is a bat bite other than Google (which is, let's face it, in some ways quite dumb) said it could be from a photo. It isn't a bat bite, try and stop worrying about it and get on with prepping for your trip.

(I also personally would not be contacting my GP, as you have no actual medical concerns)

That is not a bat bite. There is no wild bat in the UK with a big enough jaw to reach that far around your palm and bite you at that sort of angle.

Definitely from the dog lead. Check the links/buckle on the lead.

There's a huge difference between the hospital seeing three potential bat bites (ie people concerned they could have been bitten when probably in reality were not) and 3 bar bites.

We have no idea of the ratio of potential bat bites to potential bat bites. The more people here in the media about bats the more anxious they're likely to be. It doesn't necessarily mean the risk has increased.

The lead is a smooth extendable one, it isnt frrom the lead. And has been there fof over 24 hours now

In the ki dest way, get the hell off Google.

The skin is not punctured, you have probably laid on something in your sleep.

Cannot believe you are wasting an actual doctors time with this

Bats in the UK are tiny - the gap between those marks is far too big for a bat plus bat teeth are titchy they wouldn’t leave marks like that. Do you have health anxiety? That is a massive leap to make between unexplained marks on your hand and a rabid bat has bitten you.

It’s a very odd mark but doesn’t seem to be punctured.

The infected saliva needs to get into the blood stream to become infected which is why you should always wash it under running water to remove the saliva.

Most people who get infected are through dogs because bats try and stay away from people.

In the UK the amount of rabies is so small that you’d have to be extremely unlucky to get it.

I do understand why you’d be concerned about what to do as it is odd.

Honestly, I think your risk of dying from a reaction to the vaccination or getting hit by a car on the way to having the vaccination is probably way more likely than actually getting rabies and so I think I’d just take my chances - I am not a medical professional though.

Just wanted to say I don't think you're being 'anxious' OP! They are weird marks and any of us would want to know what the hell they are! People suggesting an indentation from the lead would last for over 24 hours are nuts.
I've had quite a few spider bites and they are always raised in my experience. Rather than indents. I have one now, two red bumps 3mm apart.
Sorry you're going through this! But I don't think you're over reacting/mad.

Also to add spider bites are always really itchy and sore at first for an hour or so in my experience.

If there hadn't been bats flying round in the woodland, what would you have assumed the marks to be from? Given you have no evidence that there was ever a bat in your room or even your house - you didn't see one or hear one, you're just assuming that there must have been one because you can't explain the marks on your hand. I'm a gardener and get loads of injuries daily that I don't notice happening and I can't say what happened to cause the injury. For example I get stabbed by brambles so frequently that it just doesn't register any more. I see marks and scuffs and think "I wonder what did that?"

I have sympathy for you because it must be rubbish living with such a high level of anxiety. Those marks don't appear to have pierced the epidermis, just dented the outer level in. There's no sign of any ingress by a foreign body: no redness in the area, no swelling, no blood or plasma seeping out, no itchiness or pain. My conclusion would be that something has pressed in to the skin for a considerable time, something not actually sharp enough to have pierced through, and it has left these dents. With no sign of a bat in your house overnight - no guano on the floor or surfaces for example - it's so exceedingly unlikely that is WAS a bat and your fears on this occasion are groundless. By all means go through the process for the reassurance but if I were you I would seek therapy of some kind for the anxiety at some stage.

That mark on my hand wouldn't even give me cause to think, let alone Google what it might be. Unless the skin is punctured, I'd assume that I boshed my hand on something whilst gardening etc.

Yes, I agree. I was going to post that the gap between the indentations is too far for it to be a spider. Likely something the size of a full grown tarantula, at a push. And you’d certainly know about it!
They do just look like indentations, like you’ve slept on something, so something like that. They don’t look punctured, aren’t red or swollen or bleeding so definitely doesn’t look as tho anything has punctured the skin, as you’d at least have had some blood on your hand, but you can look closely and will see that there probably aren’t any holes.
I can, sort of, appreciate your fear of rabies, when I was a kid, for a little while, I was convinced rabies was going to be everywhere, after some kind of psa or something! But it settled down and disappeared 😄 You’ll be ok! I don’t want to downplay your anxieties about it, but the marks will go away and likely you’ll never find out what it was. I’ve woken up with bruises in weird places and wondered how on earth they could’ve happened but never knew why!

I do realise op that different people have different worries. I'm completely obsessed with something totally different at the moment. So whilst I don't have health anxiety, I do worry about other stuff.

Have a good holiday.

If there's even a 0.001% chance of it being a bat bite, I wouldn't take any chances OP. Rabies is, as mentioned, 100% fatal if you don't get the vaccine as soon as possible.

You should get the shots. If you weren't actually bitten then no harm done but if you were then you'll die.

If a bat had flown into your room you would know it was there. It would’ve flown about in a noisy flapping panic because it probably wouldn’t be able to get back out, and would very likely have woken you, but, as you say, it would’ve made your dogs go nuts, even if it did eventually find its way out.
eta: I’ve been bitten by a false widow (somebody gave that as a suggestion further up) and the bites don’t look anything like that. They are pretty small spiders and their bits are really small and close together fang punctures, and also don’t leave marks like that, just tiny little holes in the skin. And they would at the least cause some itching and possibly a bit of swelling directly around it b

My son was woken up by a bat on his head on our last night in France. We had been getting bats in our room all the time we were there.
DD did some reading on our journey home and found the advice re rabies so we took DS to the walk in centre when we got home (Saturday so GP closed) - they told us not to be “silly” “bats eat insects, they don’t bite people”. 111 said more or less the same thing! This was about 8 years ago - hopefully NHS staff have been educated a bit more since then. DS was absolutely fine.

WTF is the matter with you?

Probably an awful lot, tbh! But just Ignore them and report it. I’ve just done so, so hopefully if others do too they’ll remove it (and the poster) soon enough.

They were at it on the night watch 🙄

This.

I’ve had bats accidentally fly in the house twice over the last 30 years, you’d definitely know it was there as would your dogs, they kick up an almighty fuss.

One of them was found in our boiler cupboard after the cat kept trying to get in there when he had ignored the cupboard for the previous 6 years. The 2nd time it flew in a window, caused a lot of panic at 11pm and got trapped in the voile trying to get out again, ended up putting on oven gloves and helping it outside, they’re actually very cute up close.

It doesn’t look like a bite to me, more an indentation from something, especially if there’s no pain or swelling, maybe something you held or leant on. If your dogs sleep in your bed could it have been one of their collars?