Last Sunday night I found a cat on the side of a road. The cat was limping really bad so I pulled over to call the Houston Humane Society to see if they could help it. I figured since I had a carrier with me I would see if I could get him and take him myself. I was able to walk right up to him, reach down and pet the top of his head. He wasn't scared, he even started rubbing his head around my hand. I picked him, walked over to my truck and he stayed calm the whole time. I put him in my carrier and as I'm closing the top he jumps up and bites the crap out my hand, right in between my index finger and thumb. Then he just takes off into the woods. After yelling for minute I realized I was bleeding pretty bad and decided to go to the E.R.. I get to the E.R. and wait for a couple or hours for them to call my name and when they do, they take me back and have me sit in the hallway next to a nurses station. As I'm sitting there I can hear two doctors talking about the Rabies shots. I couldn't make out every word that was said but I did hear the words "pain", "painful", and my favorite, "This is going to hurt.". First the nurse gives me two shots, a Tetnius (sp?) shot and an antibiotics shot. Then later he comes back and takes me into a room so I can drop my pants for the Rabies shots. I think I got five shots making it seven total for the night. (there could have been 8 but I'm not sure....they were all kind of a blur) Each rabies shot was 3 cc. I got 2 in the right leg, 2 in the right hip and 1 in the right arm. They didn't hurt has much as I thought they would but they did burn a little. Then there was Wednesday.......my second session. I need to have the shots on the 3rd, 7th, 14th and the 28th days from the day of the bite. This time I only got one shot. Yay I thought, but it was one big shot. 12 cc I think. It didn't really hurt but it did burn and when I got home I felt like I was coming down off of acid or some other kind of drug. My whole body was numb and buzzing, it wasn't fun at all.
I was always told that they administered rabies shots through the stomach. There's something about getting my stomach pierced with a foot-long needle that really freaks me out. I'm happy to hear that they stab you in the legs, hips and arms now instead. Cat bites are very dangerous even if the animal doesn't have rabies. Cats (even house cats) have bacteria on their teeth that can be extremely harmful, and in some cases fatal, to humans if instroduced into the bloodstream.
I thought same thing too and I was scared. One of the doctors there told me that she had to get 28 shots in her bellybutton when she was a kid. The doctor told me that cat bites almost always get infected. He said he didn't want to bandage it cause he wanted it to be able to drain. I woke up Monday morning and my hand was swollen with puss oozing out. It was nasty
I'm sorry your efforts to do a good thing came back to bite you (literally). I wish the vast majority of people who own animals didn't. My wife and I once found a Great Dane on the outskirts of town (Odessa, Texas), right along I-20. He was a beautiful dapple gray. I went and bought some food, because he was skinny. He was kind off the feeder road, just on the other side of a barbed wire fence. When we pulled over and called him, he came up to the car. I poured the food out the window. After a minute or two, I concluded he was just a big, hungry, goofy dog. So we put him in the back seat of our mid-sized Saturn. He wouldn't sit down, so his back was as high as the roof of the car. He had to droop his head just to fit. We lived in an apartment at the time, so there was no way we could keep him, so we brought him to the pound. Although I don't like it, I'd rather them put him to sleep than for him to slowly starve to death.
