Virginia Woman Wakes to Bat in Her Mouth, Raises Rabies Awareness

In the quiet of a Richmond, Virginia bedroom, a woman woke to find a bat at her mouth — a moment that lasted seconds but carried the weight of one of medicine's most sobering realities. Rabies, nearly always fatal once symptoms emerge, demands not courage but swiftness, and this woman, herself a physician, understood both the danger and the remedy. Her willingness to speak publicly about a frightening and intimate encounter transformed a private alarm into a public lesson about the thin line between wildlife and human space, and the urgency of acting before that line is crossed.