<p>This is kind of long- I hope I don’t get cut off. As an OT student, my last 6 months of college was fieldwork- working for free for 6 months for credit. I was placed at a state mental health hospital in a very rural area- town of 400 people. They provided housing on the hospital grounds and another student from my school was my roommate. We had a flat in a house that was split into 4 apartments. Eight weeks into the 12 week placement, I woke up in the middle of the night to this sound of paper rustling and thought my roommate was up late doing her progress notes. As I became more awake, I realized it was wings flapping! I lept out of bed and turned on the light to see a bat hovering over my bed. I ran out of the room and slammed the door. My roommate was still up so I went in her room and told her there was a bat in my room. I was completed freaked out. She was like “eh, so?” but we called the maintenance department and they send two guys with tennis rackets over but they can’t find the bat so they leave. </p>
<p>I couldn’t go back to sleep so I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a diet coke and it’s like 2:30 am. Suddenly, the bat swooped from the living room to the back hallway- so it had escaped my bedroom! I went in my roommates room and told her I couldn’t stay in the apartment. I was near panic at this point. I asked her to get my clothes and purse from my bedroom because I was afraid to go in there. She got them, I told her I was leaving and it was up to her whether to join me or not. She decided to join me.</p>
<p>I go to the door of our apartment, right next to the bathroom, and glance in the bathroom as I’m opening the front door. I see the bat hanging from the window frame in there and nudge my roommate and point, silent. As she looks up, the bat comes swooping in our direction. I was like one of the 3 Stooges trying to unlock that door but we get out and in the hallway, I suddenly have this mental image of this foyer being filled with bats and I become paralyzed with fear. My roommate is freaked out now too because she has finally seen the darn thing and she pushes me out the main door. We get in my car and she asks me where we’re going to go. I tell her I have no idea. I remember there is a Big Boy in town and the Big Boys around my hometown are all open 24/7 so we’ll go there. We get there, it’s closed. But 7-11 is open! So we go in there, unsure what to do next. We tell the guy at 7-11 why we’re out and about and he tells us the police will come and help, but since we’re on hospital grounds we aren’t sure that’s true. </p>
<p>We get back in the car and go to the hospital’s main building and talk to the switchboard operator. She tells us she will call the maintenance guys again but the hospital’s medical infirmary is empty and we can sleep there if we want, so we do. It’s kind of creepy sleeping in a state mental health hospital infirmary I’ll tell you… even if it’s empty. Morning comes and I send my roommate into the apartment with a list of what I need to get ready for work and we go to the building where our OT room is to “get ready”. When our supervisors get there, we tell them and they get on the phone with maintenance and were quite assertive that something needed to be done. They smoked out the apartment, which is supposed to make any bats leave, and they found several potential areas where the bat could have come in, but they didn’t get the bat. They sealed any possible entry points. Originally, the fireplace had a whole bunch of newspaper stuck up the chimney and my roommate, thinking it was a fire hazard, had removed it! The think that’s how the bat got in. </p>
<p>I went home that weekend and took a lot of my stuff with me. I dumped it all out on my driveway and went through it one by one to make sure I didn’t bring a bat home. The rest of my time at that placement, I slept with my sheet completely over my head because I was so freaked out. I never knew I was afraid of bats but needless to say, I am. </p>
<p>FYI- They use cat gut tennis rackets because the bats cannot detect the cat gut with their radar. </p>
