First of all, I want to apologize to everyone here for my failure to provide support to others to the extent I feel I should. I hav'nt even answered my PM's. It's tough when you have depression. I have been here for months now and rarely post unless I need help and I need to learn to reciprocate once in awhile. I guess I get so down in the dumps that sometimes I'm just totally unmotivated beyond the point of asking for help or posting some rant. I come back here, read the replies and then crawl back into my shell again.

As I sit here typing this, the next door neighbor's 4 pitbulls are barking in concert with the another neighbor's dog. It's been going on for days now. Everything was peaceful here for several years until they moved nextdoor to us. Two families in one small house, 2 generations of children and 4 pit bulls. They fight and argue all the time. Thier dogs bark and howl all day and night. Car doors slamming, motors revving, children running all over the place without parental supervision. It goes on endlessly.

I put on my jacket and went for a walk this evening. It was dark and cold outside. Halfway down the road I saw something swoop down within about 25-30 feet of my head and fly off. I live in Florida and see the occassional bat here and there (maybe 3 in the last 10 years) so I figured it was a bat. I freaked out and started walking really fast, turned around and headed home.

About an hour later, I was rinsing out the bathtub and my finger kind of burned. I dried my finger off and noticed what looked like a small, superficial papercut. Well, of course my hypochondria began to kick in and the next thing I know, I'm looking up information on bats. Now mind you, this bat never came very close to me and I had my hands in my jacket the whole time as far as I can remember (like I said it was cold out).

I found out that bats don't attack people, suck thier blood or fly into your hair and that rabid bats are even LESS likely to become aggressive. I also read that there are no blood-sucking bats in the U.S. (ie; Vampire bats) and that bats are very non-agressive creatures. All of this I read in a number of places including the CDC's website. Also, you almost ALWAYS feel a bat bite which is usually a tiny puncture wound but can also be a laceration. My "wound" was a paper-cut type injury and since I have been doing all kinds of stuff today, I assumed that I must have gotten a cut at some point. Ah...but the mind always wants to focus on the 0.000001% chance that something bad has happened.

I would say that the chances of that bat having bitten me without my knowledge would be the same as if I was in the same room with a goat and even though I had no contact with it (or was even very close to it), I later had a little pain in my leg so my mind starts playing tricks on me and I begin to wonder against all odds if maybe the goat butted me without my knowledge and then I start obscessing over it and backtracking, trying to remember every detail of where I was at a certain time and where the goat was and how close we were to each other, etc. I tell you, you can drive yourself nuts!.

Now, I could rush down and get a rabies shot on the extremely slim chance that I was bitten (without my knowledge) even though the wound is not a typical bat bite, my hands were not exposed during my short walk (to my best recollection), the bat was exibiting no odd behavior (ie; bats are nocturnal and it was at night when I saw it), it did'nt come that close to me, I could'nt swear that it was even a bat (although I'm pretty sure it was) and a zillion other things.

For that matter, maybe I should get the shot anyway because the other day I petted a cow and it licked me and the cow might have been bitten by a bat. Where do I draw the line between real and imagined fears when you're talking about something that could be life-threateng and yet something that has almost zero odds of having occurred?.

- Regards