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| Lisa Says: squirrel girl | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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My cellphone rang on Friday just as my hand was on the door to my office building. I took the call outside as it was from Ella's school. "Hi, Lisa? We need you to come pick up Ella. She was out in the yard when…" and here my brain went into Hyperactive Mother Drive. She was out in the yard when, what? Broken arm? Broken face? School yard scrap? What what what?! "Well, she got bit by a squirrel." Oh. Evidently, the kids were watching two squirrels chase each other when one squirrel scampered up a tree and fell out of it, near enough to the kids that Ella reached out and it scratched and bit her. A quick thinking teacher scooped up the squirrel, lying half dead on the ground, and another teacher quickly called me while they cleaned Ella's bite wound. I bolted into my boss' office to say "Can't stay, kid got bit by squirrel!" and raced back to Ella's school where there was a police car and an ambulance! Turns out that once the Department of Environmental Protection was called, they sent the ambulance. The paramedics advised that Ella get rabies shots at the hospital but I took her to her pediatrician instead, where we researched the CDC Web site and the doc called the Department of Health and discovered that squirrels aren't rabid – they're actually in the same class of animal as gerbils and guinea pigs! I couldn't help but think that I probably could've just called Nate who quickly would've told me that squirrels aren't rabid and he then would have proceeded to regale me with stories of the six separate occasions where he got bit by a squirrel and one instance that involved a double-dog-dare-you, a bottle of whiskey and a squirrel where Nate was the one that did the actual biting. Anywho. The entire time, Ella couldn't have cared less about what was going on - she wasn't upset at all. In fact, I think she was thinking it was a you-broke-it-you-buy-it situation: surely, the squirrel was now her pet, right?!?! The squirrel in question was whisked away by the DEP to get checked for rabies just in case (came back clean, of course, but he is not coming back, if you catch my drift) and we now figure that Ella is approximately 30% squirrel. And, just in case you want to know what a squirrel chomp looks like: 
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›comments[8] ›all comments ›post #610 ›bio: lisa may ›perma-link ›9/24/2008 ›18:53 ›archives ›first post ›that week Category List
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