Originally at https://www.nytimes.com
One night a few weeks ago I went to bed early, bothered by the oppressive heat and dismayed by that week’s political news — President Biden’s lackluster ABC News interview and Donald Trump’s claim earlier that day that he knew “nothing” about Project 2025. I was tired, too, from explaining the recent daily news broadcasts to my two daughters — one 6 and the other one 10 — including what the phrases “hush money” and “porn star” meant. My husband stayed up working, and very early the next morning a bat flew into our bedroom, through a screen door left open by accident. What happened over the next few days restored my faith in the systems in our country that keep us safe.
“Bat!” I told my husband, sleeping beside me. Though it was still dark, the thick flapping was unmistakably the sound of Earth’s only flying mammal.
“It’s one thing after another,” my husband said, clambering out of bed to grab something to catch it with.
This happened to us before, about five years ago, which is when we learned about the need to isolate and trap any bat that invades our sleeping space for rabies testing. Though bats are beneficial insectivores, they’re also our highest risk for contracting rabies, a fatal disease carried by about 6 percent of bats tested in the continental United States.
We isolated the bat in our bedroom, making sure it couldn’t get upstairs where our daughters sleep, but it escaped through the door to the porch. To decide what to do next, we consulted every resource. Richard, my husband, read the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website. I called our health care after-hours line and spoke to a nurse who also consulted the C.D.C. We called our county’s animal control center, and an officer was at our house within 10 minutes. He searched the house and garage for bats, found none and put in a report to our county’s public health department.
“How deep a sleeper are you?” the county health nurse asked Richard when she called us on the next evening. She was assessing our risk of being bitten or scratched while we slept.
After answering noncommittally, he passed the phone to me, and I tried to reassure her. “I’m such a light sleeper. I woke up right away. I’m sure of it.”
We had no idea what rabies shots would cost, and the bat hadn’t gotten near our daughters; that was the most important thing. But the county nurse talked us through the risks and shared her experience with a bat, which had swooped down on her in her garden. “It’s your life we’re talking about,” she told us. We had a short window postexposure to decide. After that, the shots wouldn’t work.
On Sunday morning, we went to the emergency room of the University of North Carolina Hospital. (In most communities, the emergency room is the only place you can get rabies vaccines.) The doctor we saw persuaded us to get the shots. Soon after, hospital staff members gave us the injections, one in each arm. They hurt more than a flu shot but not much more.
So far, we’ve paid $600 in E.R. copays, with heftier hospital bills to come. While I regret that our health care system regularly forces people to consider cost when making life-or-death decisions, I’m grateful that insurance will help my husband and me pay for the health care we need. Despite everything going on in our country and our state — Mr. Trump and the looming threat of autocracy, that he selected an anti-abortion hard-liner for his running mate and that here in North Carolina we have a lieutenant governor who recently claimed that “some folks need killing”— I am reminded of how much good we now enjoy, which hangs in the balance of this election. Not just our lives and the lives of our children but also the government systems that keep us informed and protected.
After our visit from the bat, our sheriff’s department, public health department and university hospital all functioned exactly as designed. The C.D.C., a huge federal agency that works to protect every one of us from infectious disease, food-borne illness and emerging threats like bird flu, pulled through. The C.D.C. is part of what Mr. Trump’s allies would call the administrative state and is in the cross hairs of Project 2025, which proposes breaking up the agency, limiting public health messaging and reducing the data collection that informs good decisions. Mr. Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, but hardly anyone who knows the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that produced the plan, or the former president is taking his claim at face value.
I want to believe Kamala Harris is right when she says “we are not going back” to a time when every calamity leaves us on our own. I don’t want to live in a country that doesn’t hold the health and safety of its citizens in high regard, and I don’t want to be left to make important decisions without guidance from qualified professionals. But for now and for at least the next six months, I don’t. I live in the United States of America — land of bats, land of doctors, land of public health — and that’s worth fighting for.
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