Epilogue

2 years, 244 days later and still alive...

My scrawny little leg, healing. The small black scab at the bottom marks the worst puncture wound.

"Okay, relax... relax... totally relaxed... relax... now... wiggle your right toes!"

"Gaaah!"

That little trick, which was intended to distract me while I was getting my rabies shots stateside, did have the desired effect, if only because I was too busy trying to remember my left from right to feel pain. Mind you, pain is much less of an issue with modern rabies vaccinations—it's not the "eight shots to the belly" people have regaled me with horror stories of. But that's just the vaccinations. No, the real fun is the other half of post-exposure rabies treatment—immunoglobulin.

Basically, here's the idea: get a horse. Now, somehow, get the horse to be immune to rabies; I'm not entirely sure how that part of it works, frankly, since rabies is, for all intents and purposes, automatically fatal1, but I guess they have their methods. Now, take a human who may have been exposed to rabies. Stick the horse's antibodies inside the human. Now the human is immune to rabies. Voilá! Now, in Turkey, they never even mentioned this whole idea (even though the World Health Organization strongly recommends immunoglobulin treatment in conjunction with vaccination), for one obvious reason—horses are expensive! And equine immunoglobulin is even more expensive, costing rather more than a thousand times as much per pound as your typical horse.

But now I was in America, where the streets are paved with blue—BlueCross-BlueShield, that is. As I reach the end of the period of my life where I'm covered by my mother's (excellent) health insurance, I'm making it a point to stick it to the bastards any way I can, even if it means getting attacked by wild Turkish dogs to justify it. The University of Maryland's health center was all too happy to help me in my goal of costing my insurance company money. The head of the health center's travel clinic (an extraordinarily nice person, even by the standards of this story) even drove me to the PG County Health Department to fill out the paperwork. They evaluated my financial situation (what financial situation?) and determined that if my insurance failed to cover the seven hundred dollars worth of goo they wanted to inject me with, I would be billed all of two dollars. As this was rather less than what we would be required to pay if the insurance company did approve it, my mother and I were fervently hoping they'd turn the claim down, but no, they put a little black mark next to my name and I got my little $700 baggie of horse antibodies.

Eight milliliters? That's nothing!

Of course, the fun part is inserting the horse antibodies into the patient. You see, humans are covered with "skin", and the immunoglobulin must be placed under this—which wouldn't be so bad, except that we're talking about a lot of immunoglobulin. Eight milliliters, to be precise; eight cubic centimeters of cold horse goo. Now, divorced from context, that may not seem like much. However, in context, let me assure you, it is more than adequate to cause discomfort. And oh, did I mention that as much as possible is supposed to go into the wound itself, and the leftover into the, ahem, "gluteal region"? If you wish to appreciate the experience, I suggest you take some strawberry jam out of the fridge, draw up eight milliliters into a nice big syringe (watch out for strawberry lumps), and inject it, still cold, into your week-old dog bites2.

Actually, the injection itself was merely excruciating, which was much better than I was hoping for. The really fun part came a few hours later, when I tried standing up, and almost fell down from the pain. Oh, and did I mention that with several cubic centimeters of recently-injected antibodies in your ass, falling asleep becomes a special kind of challenge?

But it's done now. I've had a unique experience, and now I'm essentially immune to rabies. (The next time I'm viciously attacked by savage beasts, I need only get two quick boosters—no more of the glob. To which I say: alright, Nature, bring on the dogs!) I've got lots of fun scars and a good story. Sure, I still jump a bit when the Rottweilers down the street rush the chain-link fence to bark as I go by—okay, I jump a lot. But I still like dogs, and I don't think that my psyche's scars are as deep as my leg's. So nuts to Turkish dogs! I stared down four or five of them (well, okay, "stared down, then ran away from") and I'm still standing. Go to Istanbul, I say. Admire the bitchin' Ottoman mosques and the awe-inspiring traffic. And definitely go to Dolmabahçe Palace—if only so you can tell me what it's like—and if you feel lucky, go ahead and take the shortcut through Maçka Park. And if you see the Good Dog, say "hi" for me—and then turn slowly around and walk away. Because while meeting the Good Dog's friends is hardly the end of the world, I would be lying if I said I enjoyed every moment of the experience.