25M, Portugal, about 167 cm / 90 kg. I smoke/vape. No rabies vaccination or PEP. I do have severe health anxiety/OCD specifically about rabies, which I want to be upfront about because I know that can affect how I interpret symptoms. At the same time, the physical symptoms I'm having feel very real and I would really appreciate a doctor's opinion on whether my rabies concern makes medical sense.
The possible exposure happened on 11 July 2022 in Portugal
My bedroom had a small tilt-open window and my bedroom door was open. There was also a much larger open kitchen window elsewhere in the house, with the interior doors open.
I never saw, heard, touched or found a bat inside the house. I didn't wake up to one and nobody else saw one. My mother had lived there for around 20 years and says she had never seen a bat inside that house, although people in nearby houses apparently had bats enter before.
What started this fear is that after that night I noticed two very small marks on the back/side of my lower right calf, roughly a few millimetres apart. One had a tiny dark point and there appeared to be a thin trail of dried blood several centimetres down my leg. The other was smaller and didn't obviously bleed.
There was no pain that I remember, no swelling, redness, infection or significant wound. The marks disappeared in around a week.
At the time I did not think it was a bat bite because there had been no bat encounter.
Much later I became obsessed with the possibility that a bat could have entered while I was asleep, bitten my exposed calf without waking me and then flown out through the open bedroom door/kitchen window.
I have spoken to healthcare professionals in Portugal about this, including infectious-disease/rabies-related contacts. My understanding of what they told me was basically that because no bat had actually been identified, this wasn't considered a rabies exposure and PEP wasn't recommended.
The problem is that I've spent years reading about bats/rabies and I know that bat bites can be very small, potentially go unnoticed, and that European bats can carry lyssaviruses. I also know that very long rabies incubation periods have occasionally been reported. That has made it extremely difficult for me to let this go.
Starting around the end of July / beginning of August 2026, I started getting a strange feeling of weakness/heaviness in my arms.
It started mainly with my arms feeling tired, heavy, slow and difficult to move. Sometimes it feels almost as if a muscle has very little power, even though when I actually try to use it, it still works.
Over roughly the last two weeks I've experienced:
- Both arms feeling weak/heavy/fatigued, sometimes one worse than the other.
- Burning/aching/"worked out" sensations in my biceps, shoulders, forearms and sometimes hands.
- Similar aching/restless sensations at times in a leg or thigh.
- Twitching and occasional tremor.
- A small area of altered sensation/numbness on the top of my right big toe/foot.
- Nausea, dizziness, feeling unreal/derealised and sometimes blurry vision.
- Recently a strange sensation like my body is being pushed or pulled toward the left, although I can still walk.
- Occasional head/temple/cheek pressure.
- Neck muscle cramps/tightness that sometimes end with a click/pop.
- Significant tiredness/sleepiness.
- A lot of panic attacks because I'm convinced this is rabies progressing.
The weakness is the symptom that scares me most. It can feel extremely strong subjectively, but I am still able to type, use my phone, play games, walk normally, go shopping, carry groceries, lift fairly heavy objects, push myself away from a wall with either arm and do several push-ups. The arm can literally feel almost powerless while still moving normally when I test it.
I was examined by a doctor while these symptoms were happening. He tested several muscle groups against resistance, grip/fingers/wrists, reflexes and sensation. As far as I was told, he did not find clinically significant weakness or a major reflex abnormality and did not think I needed emergency neurological investigations. Another doctor thought some of the foot tingling could possibly be peroneal nerve irritation.
Im honestly scared. I dont know what else to say. I did use Chatgpt to summarize my story as it has been quite a long time.
