My Mom

For the whole 20 minutes that I was afraid I might have tetanus, after I stepped on that rusty nail, I was reminded of how I was starting to act like my mother.
When I was living at home, we had a bit of a bat problem.

I was the bat catcher, and proud of it. Every time a bat got into the house, which happened once or twice a year, it was my job to catch it and set it free.

Once, a bat got into the house, and I promptly caught it and let it go.

However, my mom was certain that she had been bitten by the bat, and that soon, she would develop rabies.

First, she made an emergency trip to the hospital, where she was told that they thought she was fine.

She didn't believe them though, because she felt strange.

She started looking the different symptoms of rabies up on the internet, and began to develop some of them.

She made a doctors appointment,

There, the doctor told her that she didn't think my mom had rabies.

My mother was the ANGRIEST person ever in the whole wide world to be told that they DID NOT have rabies .

She wanted another opinion. She was sure she'd die.

She would not stop crying.

I remember, she sat me and my brothers down to tell us that she was going to die from rabies, and to tell us what she wanted us to do with her body after her death.

Then, she wrote out a will, and gave a copy of it my Grandmother.

You could hear her crying from the bed in her bedroom, and arguing with God.

"Why," she'd mutter while she wept, "Why rabies God?"

This was over ten years ago, and she's still alive.

Still, to this day, if you mention 'rabies' to my mom, you can make her twitch.