MARY ESTHER – Despite portions of south Okaloosa County being under a rabies alert, little information has been released about the incidents that led to the warning.
But on Monday, one of the victims contacted the Northwest Florida Daily News.
The woman identified herself as the victim of a bat attack Aug. 28 in the parking lot of the Mary Esther United Methodist Church.
“It is the strangest thing that ever happened to me,” said the woman, who asked that her name not be used.
She had pulled into the church parking lot for a meeting at 9 a.m. on a bright, sunny morning. She opened the door, stuck her left foot out and leaned back across toward the passenger seat to grab something.
That’s when she felt a thump on her foot and looked down to see what she thought was a big toad.
“I shook my foot, realized it had fur and felt a crunching, like a bee sting,” she said.
She got out of the car and stomped her foot but could not dislodge the bat. She then beat the bat’s head against her car until it fell off, but it was still alive.
A man was in the parking lot at the time and she told him she thought the bat had bitten her.
He got a pump-action gun out of his car and shot the bat three times.
She put it in her car and took it to the nearest vet, asking them if they could test it for rabies.
“I’m not afraid of bats,” she said. “But they don’t come out and land on people at 9 in the morning.”
The vet referred her to the health department, who sent her to her doctor, who referred her to urgent care, where she was told she needed to go to the emergency room.
After getting a round of shots there, she was told by the health department that the shots she’d received were in the wrong part of her body.
She went back for a series of four more painful shots.
Health department officials confirmed the bat was “extremely rabid,” she said.
Last week, Dr. Karen Chapman, the head of the local health department, told the Daily News that there was little reason to believe bats would be randomly attacking people.
“All of our human exposures have been humans choosing to interact with bats,” Chapman said. “If you see a bat on the ground, don’t touch it.”
The woman bitten in the church parking lot takes strong exception to Chapman’s statement.
“I just stuck my foot out of the car and the bat swooped down,” she said. “I did not pick it up.”