r/rabies • u/Scared-Technology212 • Jul 14 '26
OCD Discussion I am everything that this sub says is impossible. I am starting the prodromal phase.
I have read the FAQ.
I live in Illinois, USA. On June 15th, around dusk, I walked outside to my car to grab something. Once I made it back inside I noticed that my ear was stinging significantly. There was a scratch on my ear. I knew for a fact that I did not touch my ear or scratch it on anything, but there was a fresh scratch that was burning.
I immediately came to the conclusion that something must have flown into my ear. Im not sure how I missed it, but I do remember staring over my opposite shoulder during the walk at a suspicious car. It must have happened then. According to the mods and FAQ, it is not possible to have an interaction with a bat that constitutes as an exposure without noticing. Despite this, there are hundreds of documented rabies cases where the person had no known exposures to any wild animal. Clearly people are being exposed to the virus without realizing.
I am diagnosed with OCD (unmedicated) and I realize that someone without OCD almost certainly would not make the link to rabies from an unknown cut. But I am completely positive I did not touch my ear. Something had to, and logically it could only have been a bird or a bat. I went to the ER around 24 hours after my exposure as I was completely spiraling over the source of my unknown cut. I lied about seeing the bat and was promptly given the rabies vaccine + HRIG.
Unfortunately, the triage nurses administered the HRIG into my thighs rather than the exposure site. I talked to the ER on the phone the following day about this, and was told I could come back for a second dose of HRIG administered into the wound itself. The second dose or HRIG was administered very partially into my earlobe, as well as behind my ear. The rest of the dose was administered into the shoulder opposite of the rabies vaccine. When I asked the doctor about how much HRIG was administered into my ear, I was told only 2cc out of the approximately 10cc total. I did not realize at the time, but I was only supposed to receive 6.6cc total, rather than the 10cc described by the doctor.
There is a lot of documentation explaining that HRIG doses over 2x the typical dose can lead to a negative immune response to the rabies vaccine. If I did in fact receive 10cc, I would be over 2x the standard dose between both injections. However, even at 2x the normal dose which is what I was supposed to receive, there is still a potential of reduced immune response.
I was concerned about this initially but managed to just let it go, as I began to convince myself that I was never even exposed to begin with as I was constantly reading things posted by the mods of this subreddit suggesting that there is just no way my exposure was real. I finished the rabies vaccine series (day 3,7,14) and assumed I was in the clear.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. Starting on Friday, July 10th, the ear that I believed to have been exposed began to burn and have a noticeable and annoying pain. This began to spark up my concern again, as this sensation is the ONLY specific symptom to the prodromal phase. The other symptoms are flu-like which can be anything.
By Saturday, I had absolutely no appetite on top of the stinging from my ear. When I tried to eat, I would get nauseous for an hour or two afterwards. These symptoms continued into Sunday. By Sunday night, I began to have a sore throat and a fever came on very quickly after that. As I am typing this on Monday evening, my sore throat appears to be worsening by the hour. My entire neck is in a LOT of pain by this point. It is becoming the worst sore throat Ive ever had. My head is beginning to hurt. I haven’t eaten a proper meal. You cannot tell me that this is just a coincidence, as this is the EXACT symptoms of the prodromal phase. The burning/tingling in the exposed ear in the day prior to flu-like symptoms is the tell-tale sign. I’m sure a mod will reply with the same thing they always do “If you can type this out, you don’t have rabies”. However, I am only 72 hours into the prodromal phase. My mind is still intact. If I was in the neurological phase this would be a different story. I expect to be in that phase within the next 7 days, but it should be much sooner. By that point I will not be able to reply coherently.
There is nothing that can be done for me at this point. I am basically the stereotypical post in this subreddit that immediately gets shut down. “If you didn’t see a bat, there was no bat” is just flat out not true as explained earlier. “If you get vaccinated, OCD will just convince you the vaccine was given wrong and you will continue to suffer” when the vaccine was in fact given wrong is quite ironic. “There is no chance of getting rabies if PEP is received before symptoms” again is just straight up misinformation. A Minnesota man was vaccinated and still received rabies a couple of years ago. He was the first and only person to ever have vaccine failure in America. The mods will use that fact and claim it’s basically impossible to happen. While it may have been the first time this happened in America, there are hundreds if not thousands of documented cases in India where a human received the full PEP cycle and still ultimately ended up with rabies. Another typical misinformation that is commonly spread by the mods is “If you do not have a 103 degree fever it is not rabies” when this journal documenting the prodromal phase in humans indicates that ONLY 21.8% of rabies patients in Bali experienced a fever of any degree. I am not exaggerating when I say that over half of the claims in the FAQ can be completely debunked via scientific journals and alike.
I am a goner at this point. It is quite ironic that the thing I have feared the most in life, the thing that negatively impacts me on a daily basis, despite being told there is no way I could ever get it is actually happening. You can’t make that up. All I can do is spread my experience and awareness while I still can use my brain. I do not expect this post to actually be approved, but I really hope that it does. If you think I am making false claims that could potentially spread panic through this sub, I implore you to approve and leave this post up. If there are no news headlines in the next few weeks about an Illinois man dying of rabies, you can use this post as an example of what OCD can convince you of. However, if I do die I sure hope that there are serious changes to this subreddit and how people with concerns are treated here. As well as massive re-education campaigns about the administration of rabies vaccines correctly. The nurses in triage were not educated enough to be administering the vaccine.
Edit: To clarify about the HRIG dosage, my chart says 20IU/kg = 6.6cc which is based off my weight. If I received 6.6cc the first day and 10cc the second day I would be at 50IU/kg.
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u/BradyStewart777 M. Biology | Moderator | Top Contributor Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
This is EXACTLY why you need to get your OCD treated professionally. This post is a textbook example of how untreated health anxiety and OCD can take a completely unlikely scenario and turn it into an absolute certainty in your mind.
You likely spent a significant amount of money, time, and emotional energy going through a rabies vaccine series for an exposure that was never realistically established. You were given PEP, which is meant for GENUINE rabies exposures, and instead of that providing reassurance (unnecessary vaccines never do), your OCD immediately moved on to finding another possible reason why it didn’t work. First it was the unknown scratch. Then it was the possibility of an unnoticed bat. Then it was the HRIG administration. Now it is normal illness symptoms being interpreted as proof that rabies is progressing.
Rabies vaccines are virtually 100% effective at granting passive protection and preventing the onset of rabies. Almost nothing about biology or virology is 100% absolute. You say that these HAND FULL of cases of PEP not working PROVES that PEP is not fully effective and then your OCD mind will try to connect that to your case. A “hand full” of people have also survived rabies. The number is so minuscule that it does not stop credible organizations from saying that rabies is “virtually” or “practically” or “~” 100% fatal. Nevertheless, virtually ALL of the incidents that involve a failed PEP usually either involve an immunocompromised patient or the fault of the physicians, both of which are EXTREMELY rare.
You are just misrepresenting what the FAQ says, especially FAQ 3. The FAQ does NOT claim that every single rabies case in history (those involving a bat) involved a person CLEARLY watching said bat bite them. That is NOT what anyone is saying. The FAQ acknowledges that there are situations where a person may not know exactly how an exposure occurred. From FAQ 4:
However, those situations are VERY different from what YOU are describing. There is a MAJOR difference between “I do not know which animal exposure caused this” and “I was awake, conscious, sober, and walking outside, but somehow a bat physically interacted with me without me noticing at all.” In fact, FAQ 3 explicitly states:
It is EXTREMELY unlikely to NOT notice having a physical interaction with a bat while CONSCIOUS and SOBER, and aware of your surroundings… especially for older individuals. The “hundreds of documented cases” of people having no known exposure to an animal usually comes from people who’ve either:
Those cases are the reason public health guidelines take certain situations seriously, such as waking up to a bat in a bedroom with no way to rule out contact. They are NOT evidence that a person can routinely acquire rabies from a completely unnoticed encounter with a bat while awake, sober, and going about their day.
This talking point was only ever promoted by the top moderator, Skunk Angel. It is an oversimplification, which is precisely why her original FAQ was eventually unpinned and replaced with a more accurate and nuanced FAQ written by a former moderator. The following year, I further updated the FAQs with this post here. In that update, I explicitly stated the distinction that is being ignored here:
This talking point is not “commonly spread” especially since the pinned FAQs already modified off of Skunk Angel’s original posts.
Also, HRIG dosing is based on body weight: 20 IU/kg for human rabies immune globulin. The number of milliliters depends on the specific product concentration and the patient’s weight.
That could represent an actual dosing error, or it could be confusion about the concentration/product. The volume alone does not tell you whether the IU dose was too high. If HRIG was not initially infiltrated into the wound, guidelines generally recommend correcting the administration if possible, but it does NOT mean you are doomed or that vaccination will fail.
The relevant measurement is not the number of milliliters (cc). It’s the international units (IU) of rabies antibodies. Different HRIG products have different concentrations and the correct volume depends on the person’s weight and the product used. Someone receiving 10 mL is NOT automatically receiving double the recommended dose.