It was a Sunday night. I’d just come home from a trip out-of-town. I parked my car in the garage and started unpacking. I took out the bags and set them by the car before grabbing the big blanket I keep in the back seats and tossing it out off to the side of my car.
I went back in the car to get my charger when I noticed something moving. I got out of the car again and saw something crawling around under my blanket. I assumed “Oh, it must be my cat!” because that’s the only thing I’ve ever seen moving in my garage. I reached under the blanket to pet it and started thinking “wow, Snowball’s hair sure did get a lot more coarse this week.” About a millisecond later I had realized “wait, this doesn’t feel anything like Snowball.” Immediately after that thought I felt it bite my hand.
I pulled my hand out from under the blanket and dragged a raccoon along with it.
“Uh-oh. That’s not good.”
I tried to pull it off with my other hand, but his teeth were pretty sunk-in. I realized I’d tear the bejeezus out of my hand in the process of pulling him off.
“Okay, so we’ve either got fire or blunt trauma as options here. I unfortunately haven’t carried a can of axe body spray on me for a few decades, so that makeshift flamethrower thing is outta the question. I guess I’m gonna have to whack it.”
“You know, there’s a good chance this thing has rabies. Biting without letting letting go is sort of a pitbull thing, raccoons are kinda pansies. Don’t they normally run away? If he’s just chomping on my hand like this he might be rabid.”
I tried kicking him off, but it didn’t accomplish anything other than ripping my hand a bit. I realized I’d probably have to stomp the poor guy.
I brought my boot down on his hindquarters to a sickening series of *cracks*. He made a weird wheezing noise and let go before limping off somewhere. I didn’t really pay attention, I was too busy taking a picture for Twitter. I left a message for animal control and went to bed.
I woke up the next morning and realized I couldn’t use my right hand. It was so swollen it wouldn’t do anything - my whole hand was locked into loose c-shape.
“Wow,” I thought.
“That’s some good content right there.”
You know how theoretically alligators can bite with like three tons of force but it takes way less to grab their snout and prevent them from opening their jaw in the first place? It’s the same concept with your hand. Most of the time you don’t notice because there’s nothing keeping you from opening your fist aup, but as soon as things swell up just a tiny bit you realize how weak your fingers’ extender muscles are. I could still grip stuff but the minute I tried to straighten my fingers I was met with an insurmountable wall.
I went to work and sat through the Monday meetings before heading to my to get some stuff done. After a few minutes trying to use a keyboard I gave up and went to the doctor.
Walking into the office, I wasn’t terribly worried. I think the GP sensed this and saw it as a challenge.
“Lukas, this might not be super fun for your stomach, but I’m gonna put you on a pretty herculean dose of antibiotics.”
“Why?”
“Bite wounds are usually minor, but when they’re on hands things get really bad. Yours is already very advanced. If things don’t start clearing up in a few days then you’re probably going to need surgery.”
WAT?
“Surgery? Which variety?”
“Debridement, possibly amputation.”
I kept it cool, but she’d definitely spooked me a little with that one. Possibly even achieved her goal of “worrying me.” I left with a a massive bottle of amoxicillin-clavulanate horse-pills and a mental list of about 400 things I needed to Google.
Amputation obviously sucks a lot, but the alternative she gave me wasn’t great either. Debridement’s a surgical practice where they cut an appendage open and remove all necrotic tissue. In the case of hands, they basically unzip them down to the bone, including the joint capsules. It’s extremely invasive and usually there’s permanently reduced mobility afterward. If you don’t mind some gore, this paper has some nice descriptive imagery.
I went back to work. With a little practice, I figured out how to type without being able to move my fingers - I did a weird exaggerated movement with my palm to move my fingers to the keys. It looked extremely uncoordinated and I made sure to stop using my keyboard whenever someone came by because I was self-conscious of how freakish and uncoordinated it looked.
Sometime around noon I got a call from the animal control team I’d touched base with. They said they’d trapped a raccoon outside my garage and they wanted me to come and try to ID it.
“Did it have totally crushed hind legs?”
“Yep, sure does. You wanna come in and look at it to verify?”
“Do you have many other raccoons with smashed hind legs you trap around these parts?”
“Nope, this makes the first.”
“I think that probably verifies it enough for me.”
He told me he’d proceed with the rabies test if that was the case. Interesting. I wonder what a rabies test looks like?
It seems they behead the animal and ship its dismembered skull off to a lab where they cut a few pieces of its brain out to douse them in "“testing fluid.” Pretty gruesome stuff! Maybe the raccoon should’ve thought twice about biting me.
I got home and searched for more information about raccoons bites. Despite raccoon’s reputation as a pretty mean animal, there’s really not a lot of data on raccoon attacks. They’re actually extremely rare. It turns out cat bites are common though, and they have a similar enough tooth shape and oral bacterial culture I decided to use them as a proxy.
The first thing I learned was that cat bites are extremely serious, more so than even dogs five times their size. They’ve got insane complication rates.
33% of people with a cat bite to the hand need to be hospitalized and 67% of those hospitalized need surgery… Meaning 20% of cat bites to the hand require surgery. That’s absolutely nuts. Why would cats (and raccoons, with their similarly-styled fangs) be so dangerous?
Sharp feline teeth act like needles to puncture your skin and force bacteria inside. Your skin heals over the tiny wound and traps all the bad stuff in there, which leads to an extremely high rate of infections. It’s even worse on your hands because there are a lot of tendons, tendon sheaths and joint capsules where you don’t get a lot of bloodflow. That puts you at a massive disadvantage fighting off an infection because your body’s ability to mobilize immune cells or antibiotics to the area isn’t great.
By contrast, dog bites usually result in tears and lacerations - these look worse externally, but they’re really easy to clean and they heal up without complication most of the time. The duller canine teeth do more shredding than penetrating.
I did luck out in a way, though - bites to the top of the hand (extensor side) are substantially less threatening than bites to the bottom (flexor side). The underside of your hand is basically one big tendon sheath, and if the bacteria get in there the chances you’ll need surgical intervention skyrocket.
This picture also illustrates some of the reason surgery is highly undesirable. Hands are just an absolute web of tendons. This is why people usually suffer loss of mobility after debridement surgery in their hands - it’s just a web of obstacles for the surgeon. On top of that, tendons don’t ever ‘heal’ fully.
Tendons are strong because the fibers making them up are all aligned in the same direction, like part B of the image above. When they get torn, they don’t heal back like they were - the scar tissue that fills things in is disordered, like part C of the above image. They’ll still function, but it doesn’t have the same directional strength it did before. You can mitigate this some by loading the body part progressively as it heals. The forces signal to your body how the fibers should be aligned and it helps improve the situation a bit, but it won’t ever be like it was prior to injury.
On a less technical side, people who worked at animal shelters suggested you could reduce the chances of infection to nearly zero with rigorous enough scrubbing immediately after the injury. I’d cleaned it the injury out with soap and water, but apparently that wasn’t good enough - they said you had to get in there with a thick-bristled brush and dig into the wound cavity as much as you could. In cases where the wound’s scabbed over they all recommended ripping the scab open and digging the bristles in to clear out whatever you can. The general consensus was “it should hurt more than the bite did, but it’ll hurt less than the infection you would’ve gotten otherwise.”
My hand swelling like an infected balloon indicated I’d sort of missed my opportunity to do preventative cleaning, but it’s definitely something I’m keeping in mind for future animal attacks. They seem to be happening a lot in my life lately so I’m sure it’ll come in handy soon.
Other pieces of advice I found were to elevate the injury and hit it with some periodic hot water baths. Raising the infection above your heart lowers the pressure to decrease swelling. The heat from a water bath helps fight the infection because your body can tolerate heat better than the invasive bacteria can. I did these things as much as I could over the next couple of days, mostly because I couldn’t do anything else. The injury made all activity extremely inconvenient. Sometime around day 2 my thumb swelled to the point it got immobilized so I lost my ability to scroll Twitter. The raccoon took everything from me.
On the upside, I got a call from the rabies testing lab. They confirmed that the raccoon was not rabid and probably just bit me because it was trapped in a dark garage without anywhere to run.
Extremely good news, because rabies has essentially a 100% kill rate once you start exhibiting symptoms. There are a couple of people who’ve lived through it, but it took some seriously freaky medical intervention. The doctors thought suppressing the patient’s brain activity to slow infection might help, so they put patients into a medically induced coma for a few months, pumped them full of ketamine and antivirals and crossed their fingers. It’s called the Milwaukee Protocol. It sometimes works, but it’s not exactly a what you want your life to rely on.
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