Well…Last Night Was Interesting…

Yesterday evening goes down in my list of the top ten most eventful nights of my life.  Let me break this down for you in timeline form:

10:30 pm– I begin writing an email and realize I have a sudden onset headache.

11:22 pm– I finish the email and realize the headache is getting worse.  I begin reading a blog and look up as a quick movement catches my eye.  I realize there is a bat in the living room.

Context break: We have lived in our house for eight years and rarely see bats flying outside.  However, this is the third bat we have had enter our house in the past two months.  We have 20 plus foot vaulted ceilings in our living room.

11:23 pm- 12:05 am– Matt and I close the door to our bedroom upstairs, close off the dining room and kitchen and make sure the kids’ bedroom doors are closed downstairs.  Bat is alternating flying around and landing on the dark stained beams.  When Bat lands on the beams, he doesn’t move for long periods of time; we are tracking him with a flashlight.  We open the sliding glass doors to encourage it to go outside.  Bat just lands and hangs out on a rafter.  We need to get it to move.  Matt goes and grabs our son’s Nerf gun and I proceed to shoot Nerf bullets in the direction of the bat.  Nobody freak out- I wasn’t trying to actually hit the bat, just get him to start flying again.  This doesn’t work.  Bat will not take flight except under his own terms.  Matt is standing out on the deck banging on an empty plastic container and whistling to create noise to help Bat “see” the open door.  This doesn’t work.  Matt did however back into a giant spider web complete with a silver-dollar-sized spider. So that was pretty funny- for me.  Bat swoops low and is getting too close for my comfort.  I bail and hid behind the glass paned barn doors separating the dining room from the living room.

12:06 am– We decide to call it quits for the night and I head to bed.  The headache has progressed into a migraine.

12:07- 2:37 am– Matt and I are both trying to sleep.  I hear one of our cats meowing outside asking to be let in.  We don’t let him in because we removed the indoor litter box are trying to break him of the habit of using it. We don’t trust him to not pee or poo on the bathroom floor yet.  Plus, kitty vs bat is not a great idea for the sake of the kitty; rabies and all that.  I hear a noise like the cat clawing the screen door or scratching on our bedroom door.  I ask Matt if he actually put both cats out.  He says he did.  I conclude the noise is the cat scratching on the screen.  Migraine is awful and keeping me awake.  I hear the bat in the living room chirping and banging into the walls and ceiling.  This strikes me as a bit odd because I never heard it chirp while we were out in the living room with it. Migraine is keeping me awake.

2:38 am- Bat grazes my face and hair.

2:38:01 am– I scream and throw the covers off and jump on my husband screaming and sobbing. Our conversation goes as follows:

“There is something flying around in here!”

“STOP IT.”

I stop screaming.

“Here. Just lie back down.”

“What? No!  I am not lying back down there is a bat flying around in here!  It touched my face!”

We turn on the lights and no bat is in sight. Migraine is awful.  I’m feeling stupid, like maybe it was just my hair or the sheets that touched my face and in my pain-filled half awake state I overreacted.  I use the restroom and as I walk out of the bathroom I come face to face with Bedroom Bat flying directly at my face in a young-Bruce-Wayne-eske-meeting-bat-destiny moment.

I scream.

“I told you there was a bat in here!”

In a very un-Bruce-Wayne-manner I run screaming and sobbing into our master closet and slam the door and sit on the floor waiting for Matt to deal with it.  Migraine is worse.

2:40 am– Matt comes and opens the closet door and tells me the bat is now outside.  He caught it in my robe.

Context break: As it turns out the scratching noise I had previously attributed to my cat and the squeaking/bumping noise I assumed was Living Room Bat was most likely Bedroom Bat climbing its way through a gap in my ceiling and flying around.

2:48 am– I take ibuprofen and try to sleep.  Yeah right.  Now I know Bat Bros can get into my bedroom.  Nausea has set in from the migraine. Fear and migraine are keeping me awake.  I nearly take myself to the Emergency Room several times, it’s so bad.

Context break: I rarely get migraines.  But when I do they come with no warning.  They typically respond to over the counter painkillers fairly quickly.  I don’t have any prescriptions to deal with them.

3:48 am- Migraine responds to ibuprofen and I finally fall asleep buried as far under the covers as possible.

Today:

I woke up feeling terrible as people apparently often do after migraines. Living Room Bat is still at large.  The exterminator I called today who graciously was able to come after hours advised us to try and catch it with a pool net when he shows his little Batty face tonight. We have no pool net.  The hardware store only has fishing nets.  Few people in our county have pools- there is no pool supply store.  The helpful hardware store employee told me I couldn’t catch a bat with a net because he tried hitting them with a broom as a kid when they flew out of some barn he was in and was never able to hit one.  Thanks guy, but the terminator (yep, pretty sure I call him that) told me to catch it with a net.  So now… here we sit. 8:18 pm.  Waiting for Living Room Bat to reveal himself.  We have no net.  Just an empty plastic container noise maker, open doors, a plan to trap him in a room with lower ceilings if possible… and our hopes and dreams.