DoG BITEs MaN
Like most horrible accidents, It all began innocently enough. We'd been at some kind of concert down by the embankment, and afterwards a few people had gone to somebody's flat to drink vodka. Typical spring evening in Russia. It was pretty warm, but there was still a chill in the air.
English Teacher R had gone home angry and drunk; his wife was drinking with some of her friends -- a chattering, giggling bunch of teens referred to by English Teacher R as "the Gremlins" -- and African Student S was there, and they invited me over.
Loads of vodka went down on top of the beer we'd already drunk.
As we were leaving to go out to the Degenerate Bar at 12:30am, I opened the door and the family dog ran outside. A large yellow collie type of thing.
I staggered outside after it, and saw a large yellow dog sitting near the garbage dumpster. It was dark; all the streetlights in the courtyard behind the delapidated Soviet apartment block had burned out long ago and nobody was ever going to replace them.
"Here doggy," I said.
It sat there placidly.
"Come on boy. Time to go back inside." I held my hand out to it. It didn't move, just sat there staring at me.
I tried to tug it by the collar, and noticed that it didn't HAVE a collar, just about the time it whipped its head around and sank it's teeth into the meat of the bottom part of my hand and snarled evilly as it shook my hand back and forth a few times.
Oops. Wrong doggie.
As tends to happen when one is drunk and one suddenly finds oneself seriously injured, I just gaped in complete surprise for a few moments, then yanked my hand away.
It didn't hurt much; but then I was completely shitfaced anyway.
I ran back inside and screamed "JESUS CHRIST! LOOK WHAT HAPPENED!"
I held my hand up to the assembled rank in the kitchen and they all screamed. Blood was streaming freely from the large mangled wound, bits of ripped flesh hanging from it.
There was a general panic about what to do. "DISINFECTANT! I NEED DISINFECTANT! SOAP! ALCOHOL! MOTHER FUCKER! I'M GOING TO HAVE TO GET RABIES SHOTS! JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! DO YOU KNOW HOW PAINFUL THAT'S GOING TO BE??!!"
There was a bit of indecision about whether it would be okay to wash out a wound like that with tap water; the tap water isn't too clean here in Russia.
"MOTHER OF CHRIST! RABIES SHOTS! HOLY FUCKING SHIT! FORTY SHOTS IN THE STOMACH AND LIKE A MONTH IN THE HOSPITAL! CHRIST!"
There wasn't any vodka left in the kitchen, but they found another bottle and opened it and douched out the wound, and wrapped a napkin around it, then went out to get a car.
We rolled into a cheap clinic. Cheap Russian clinics are all the same -- paint peeling off the walls, furnishings from the 70's, a general atmosphere of post-Soviet despair found in few other places within Russia.
It wasn't very crowded, despite it being Saturday night at 12:30am -- perhaps it was too early. African Student S handled talking to the administration, who were more interested in whether I had any ID or not than whether or not I was dying. They directed us to another office within the building, where a completely nonplussed couple of young interns disinfected the wound and wrapped it up in about a minute, and then waved in the next guy, a flathead in a leather jacket who had gotten his nose smashed in pretty good. They gave me a bunch of forms. African Student S consulted with the doctor about what kind of follow-up treatment I would need, and was just told to come back the next day.
My hand was tightly bound up in disinfectant-soaked gauze splotched with blood. They waved down another car as I went to a kiosk and bought three bottles of beer for the road.
"Are we still going to the Degenerate Bar?" asked ETR's wife.
"HELL YES!" I replied. "I'M GONNA SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYBODY WITH THIS THING!"
"Oh, don't worry, girls will want to have sex with you, they'll feel sorry for you."
"AND I'LL BLEED ALL THE FUCK OVER 'EM!" I laughed hysterically.
Unsurprisingly, I wasn't much of a hit with the chicks that night. I did scare the hell out of everybody, though. I can't even remember all the stories I told about how it had happened; I made them up off the top of my head. I told people I'd been bitten by a wolf, stabbed in the hand by a skinhead, that I'd smashed it through a window, etc.
I remember I told this fat girl that hangs out there that she was beautiful. I suppose my heart had been moved to acts of kindness by the huge gory wound on my hand.
I guess we got home around five, all of us back to the apartment of one of the Gremlins. I immediately flopped down on the bed and passed out.
I was awoken by light and noise a few hours later. ETR was standing in the doorway, smiling, looking quite pleased. His wife was on the other side of the bed I was lying on, wearing her jeans and a bra, with her head hanging over the edge, a washbucket full of vomit under her. She was moaning, in agony, trying to vomit but not having much left in her to vomit. (She'd given birth to their daughter a mere three months before -- she'd had to stop drinking for that period, so her tolerance wasn't what it used to be.) One of the Gremlins was trying to keep ETR's wife's hair out of the vomit.
African Student S was passed out on the sofa wrapped around another one of the Gremlins, snoring. Another African student was quietly using the Internet in the corner.
"Geez, you guys had a good night, didn't you?" said English Teacher R.
"LOOK! A DOG BIT ME!" I said. "You should see it, it's a beauty!"
His wife began moaning and crying and retching again though, so I decided to go home.
The walk of twenty minutes through the bright sunny spring morning passed in the blink of an eye -- I was still drunk from the night before. I slammed into my apartment and immediately took off the bandages and took pictures of the disgusting, swollen, ragged wound and emailed them to all my friends in other countries.
Then I passed out again.
I woke up around one, took a quick clumsy shower, bought three beers and walked back to the Gremlin's apartment. I immediately went inside and got African Student S. "Come on you dumb fuck! We have to go back to the hospital."
So we went back to the hospital and waited quite a while to see a bearded doctor. He was surprised to meet a couple of foreigners, so we had to answer all the usual questions.
As regards the dog bite, he didn't really have much advice. If I really thought it was possible the dog had rabies, I could get some rabies shots. The technology had improved, and the shots were no longer a series of 40 in the stomach -- instead a mere ten in the arm -- but he did point out that I wouldn't be able to drink while I was undergoing the series. And there were sometimes bad reactions to the serums.
We all agreed that would be undesirable, with summer coming up and all. He recommended observing the dog to see if it had symptoms.
Couldn't we catch it and have it tested for rabies?
Probably, he agreed, but he didn't know who would be able to do such a thing. Maybe some private veterinary service. Certainly there were no facilities at the clinic for such a thing.
Well, should I worry? Was there a lot of rabies in the area?
Yes, there was, but not so much in the city center, kind of out in the suburbs and such.
We asked what his advice was.
Up to you, he said.
He did recommend some tetanus booster shots -- I went upstairs and waited and played "Snake" on my telephone while they administered a series of five tetanus shots, including one into my spine that didn't feel too nice.
We went back to the Gremlin's apartment to find the dog, with the idea of killing it to get it tested, and we even saw it -- still skulking by the trash cans. We drank beer and thought about the best way to do it -- throw a blanket over it and beat it to death with a stick? Poison it? What should we poison it with? Rat poison, maybe. It probably had a pretty tough stomach, though, being a street dog. . .
Anyway, we finally realized we just didn't have the balls or the guts or the heart or the cold blood or whatever it would take to kill it. We settled for telling the Gremlin to keep an eye on it.
"Does it look like it's frothing at the mouth to you?" I asked African Student S.
"Well. . . I don't know if I'd call that frothing. Drooling a bit. Panting. It's hot today."
"It doesn't seem to be acting particularly vicious or anything. But then I read on the Internet that animals can become sedate and sluggish when they have rabies, too."
"Well, Gremlin said she saw it drinking from a puddle. That's a good sign, isn't it?"
A couple days later the translator from school took me to another doctor -- a cheerful guyi n shorts and a Hawaiian print shirt with a beard, who came into the dreary ward singing cheerfully. He said that rabies shots were highly recommended, as there was a lot of rabies in the area. The side effects from the serum were rare, but the injection points should not be exposed to water, nor should one drink alcohol during the injection series, which took three months.
I had an extremely difficult week of sobriety, which included my 35th birthday. It sucked ass. I took my colleagues and my difficult Russian not-quite-girlfriend Crazy Angel to a restaurant. Crazy Angel showed up stoned, and somewhat irritated at having to leave the stoner party she was at. Everyone else got drunk and started arguing about Northern Ireland.
I'd been trying to get through the days -- in fact, I had been bitten just at the beginning of our May holiday -- by drinking non-alcoholic beer -- which with typical logic costs more than beer that actually has alcohol.
I'd had some success -- it sort of put me in the right mood, the physical comfort the same as the instant relaxation felt by a baby with a pacifier, or a junkie calming his shakes just by holding a syringe in his hands. I found that not only did I manage to achieve a sort of "phantom drunkenness" I also woke up on Sunday with a "phantom hangover" -- my Sundays usually featured hangovers, so my mind was sort of filling in the blanks.
But the stress continued. There was a horrific incident about a week after I'd been bit where a blacked-out ETR refused to go home, after I had stupidly allowed him to accompany me in meeting two girls I knew, and when I finally did get him home, his wife punched me in the face and threatened to cut her wrists.
On my third trip into the doctor's office to get a shot, I had the translator ask exactly how serious this whole business about not drinking alcohol was. Was it a hard and fast rule, or just a suggestion? I'd looked on the Internet for information about rabies vaccines and hadn't seen anything about that. I'd discovered that getting the injection points wet didn't cause any reaction either, and I hadn't had so much as a sleepless night over the injections, though they made me feel a bit woozy right after I got them the first few times.
The doctor considered. Good wine or beer was probably okay. In moderation.
Maybe a little hard liquor, if it was of good quality.
Although, he had to point out that a hell of a lot of people undergoing the shot series drank a hell of a lot, and most of them didn't have any problems.
That seemed like betting odds to me. I slid off the wagon slowly -- a few beers here, a few shots there, and by the third week I'm sure I was drinking no less than ever.
Maybe more.
The bright side was I never had to pay much for the vaccinations -- I had to pay for new syringes each time, but those only cost a few cents apiece. My stepfather said a series like that in America would have cost around $5000. In Russia it cost about $5, including the bandages and disinfectant I had to buy.
Russia is, really, a very cost-effective place to be a self-destructive drunk.