chipmunk??? as in like,, alvin???
........okay close enough
Yeah so. To set the stage. The year... is 2013. Summer break. My parents have left me and my little brother at home alone together for the first time rather than making us go to day camp in the summer. The cat now known as Mama has taken up residence on our back patio, and comes and goes as she pleases, and has been for about a year.
I hear an absolutely horrible squawking noise coming from our back patio. Where, again, the cat has taken up residence. I turn to see Mama, and she has something cornered. I think it’s a bird, because of the squawking noise, but upon closer inspection, discover it is a chipmunk.
“Oh no! I gotta save this chipmunk!” my dumb ass thinks to myself, going out onto the back patio to rectify the situation.
A reasonable person, when put in this scenario, would likely pick up the familiar cat and remove her from the equation, shooing off the now traumatized chipmunk.
However, at 15 and a lover of animals, I was not a reasonable person.
So, I followed this chipmunk around our house and cornered it on our AC unit. This takes a few minutes, and Mama is following intently, still wanting to have a chipmunk snack.
I pick up the chipmunk.
The chipmunk, understandably, doesn’t like this.
The chipmunk bites me.
Not hard, mind you, it didn’t break skin, but it scared the hell out of me and I threw the chipmunk to the ground. It did ultimately escape the wrath of my cat, at least for the day, as mere months later this same cat would have seven (7) kittens in our front bushes and hunt and bring them several dead chipmunks.
I call my mom laughing about how this chipmunk bit me. She doesn’t find it very funny, and calls my dad, who’s a naturally anxious person. My dad rushes home, squeezes where the chipmunk bit me hard enough that it DOES break skin, and then takes me to urgent care, convinced I had somehow contracted rabies. (Chipmunks don’t carry rabies.)
The urgent care cleans where I was bitten, and in trying to find a code for “chipmunk bite” to put on my chart, can’t find “chipmunk bite.” So instead, for some reason, they put “monkey bite” and make a note that it wasn’t actually a monkey at all, but in fact, a chipmunk. I am then put on an unnecessary round of antibiotics.
And that, my friends, is the story of how I was bitten by a chipmunk.
