Where's the rest of my posts? Well, I was re-reading some of them and I decided that since they were there for anyone to see, I thought it was best to do a preemptive strike and get rid of 'em.  I kept the Mordisco del Jaguar story for posterity. enjoy.

Rabies Shots (Jaguar Bite Part 2)

If you haven't read my posting "Mordisco Del Jaguar" below then this one probably won't make much sense.The morning after returning to Phoenix from Cancun it was time to get this thing looked at.

This isn't the greatest picture, but what you're looking at is just a very shallow laceration about an inch long. It wasn't the severity of the injury that was the problem (thank God!) it was the risk of rabies.

Honestly, there was probably little-to-no chance the jaguar was infected, but 1) I didn't know and couldn't find out and 2) With rabies once you have symptoms apparently there's nothing they can do for you and you die.

I went to Gilbert ER, a free-standing ER like West Valley used to be. They claim you'll be seen by a doctor in 31 min or less. They were right. That place was kickass. If only they were a Blue Cross/Blue Shield In-Network provider.

Tales of multiple injections in the stomach filled my mind as I was told of all the shots I was about to receive. I don't know if the stories of "long needles and shots in the liver" are wives' tales or if they have better medicines or what.

I got a tetanus shot, a shot of the rabies vaccine RabAvert, and the Human Rabies Immunoglobin. The first two weren't all that bad, but the HRIG sucked. The idea is to inject as much of it as they can directly into the bite. The top of my finger doesn't have much room for fluid and I sure didn't enjoy the 10 or more injections into the top of my finger. I looked at it as sort of a 'stupid tax' for putting my hand in a jaguar cage. The rest of the HRIG that didn't fit in my finger (10cc) went into both glutes. I left with a sore arm, a sore finger, and two sore buttcheeks. That was day 0.

Day 4. It's pretty much healed already.I went back on Day 3 and I get to go back on Day 7, Day 14, and Day 28 for another RabAvert. It's a pain in the ass but I have all of my fingers and I avoided rabies. I'm cool with that. I almost wouldn't have even called it a bite. More like I was scratched on the finger by a jaguar's tooth. The CDC definitely calls that a bite, though. Who am I to question the government? Everyone has stories about crazy shit that's happened to them in Mexico but not too many people can truthfully say they were bitten by a jaguar.

Mordisco Del Jaguar (Jaguar Bite)

On Monday Alison and I flew back home from our weeklong vacation in Cancun, Mexico. It was a week in paradise with one minor setback.

We stayed at the Excellence Playa Mujeres, an absolutely gorgeous all-inclusive luxury resort. The EPM is about 30 minutes north of the airport and about 10-15 minutes from downtown Cancun. About a mile from the actual resort, there's a security gate with a guard. Drive another half mile or so, and there's a big circular drive with this big bridge-like structure you drive under. As our taxi driver took us from the airport, he asked (in Spanish, of course) if we liked something-or-other, I didn't understand what. He stopped the car, took us over to a cage on the side of the bridge thing and showed us an anaconda. It was pretty neat.

Later in the trip I was telling one of our servers about seeing the anaconda and he asked if we had seen the jaguars. We hadn't, so I asked him if it was safe for us to walk outside the EPM gates. He said it was, so Alison and I took a little walk...

It was about a 10-15 minute walk back to the snake. We looked around there and saw a bunch of macaws, so we walked over to them to find a guy sitting on a milk crate (I think he was smoking weed when we walked up) who took a stick and put the bird on our shoulder for a picture. I asked him where the jaguars were and he pointed across the driveway. There is NOBODY around for probably a quarter mile except for our weed-smoking bird friend.

Alison and I walked over to the jaguar enclosure. It was a HUGE moat full of yellowish orange water and apparently at least one crocodile. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from taking a 12ft fall into the neon crocodile water but a rope "fence."

We got several pictures of two beautiful full-grown jaguars. Looking at Wikipedia, I've learned that jaguars weigh 350 lbs, roughly the same size as full-grown lions and tigers. We took our pictures and couldn't help but wonder how they feed the jaguars... The moat goes all the way around the 'island'. We walked back to the resort and asked several of the hotel staff how the jaguars get fed. Finally, one told us there was a tunnel to the island. We figured that the pipes we saw sticking up from the water must have been ventilation for the tunnel. We turned out to be right. You can see them in the picture above.

The day before we flew out we met a really cool couple named Carl and Lori who were on their honeymoon. We had stopped in at the Cafe Kafe for a beer, started chit-chatting with them, one beer turned to four, next thing you know the four of us are walking to see the jaguars.....We went back and saw flamingos, macaws, and held a kinkajou (thanks Kacy for telling us what the hell that thing was.)

The animal-keeping dudes asked us if we wanted to go in the tunnel and see the jaguars. Well of course we did! They took us to a maintenance room on the side of the enclosure that had a tunnel entrance that was about 3ft in diameter. That was all Alison needed to see to know that she DEFINITELY wasn't gonna see the jaguars any closer. Carl, Lori, and I crouched and followed one of the animal keepers through the pitch-black tunnel to a small room that was maybe 5X5X5. There were no lights in there so it was hard to tell. It was a small room though. We're crouched down in this pitch-black room and all we can see is a set of bars close to us, another set of bars maybe 8 feet further, and then sunlight. The guy raises the far set of bars, and almost immediately there's the silhouette of a jaguar right in front of us... We took a few pictures and it's only because of the flash that we'd later have any idea what the jaguar (or this filthy room) looked like up close. It was DARK!

THIS is where the problem started! What the guy ACTUALLY told me in Spanish: The jaguar doesn't have claws. It will put its' hand through the bars and you can touch the jaguar.....

What I HEARD the guy tell me: You can put your hand through the bars and touch the jaguar... There's a critical piece of translation I missed there.

I don't know if Carl and Lori were touching the jaguar's paw as he stuck it through, but thinking the guy had just told me it was okay to, I didn't hesitate to try to touch the jaguar's head...

The next events that happened took place in less than a second. I put my hand in the bars and felt teeth on my left ring finger. I remember being amazed at how hard it bit and I pulled my hand back. I felt my finger and I still had all of it attached and it didn't feel wet/blood soaked, but I was amazed at how hard and how fast the jaguar bit. I guarantee I would have lost half my finger if I would have hesitated even a second longer. Reading Wikipedia this morning I learned, "The head is robust and the jaw extremely powerful. It has been suggested that the jaguar has the strongest bite of all felids, and the second strongest of all mammals; this strength is an adaptation that allows the jaguar to pierce turtle shells."

We finished with pictures and I told the guy I REALLY wanted to get out of the tunnel. We came out and I examined what turned out to be not much more than a scratch, but it definitely broke the skin.

I needed to get back to the resort and clean this thing out. The resort had some iodine and gauze and that was it. I made a hurried $23 2-minute phone call to our friend in the States who is the Infection Control Officer for a large valley fire department. She told me the incubation period for rabies is really long and I definitely need to seek treatment but it could wait until I got back to the United States. What follows will be the subject of my next blog posting.

A few people have asked if I plan to take legal action or if I tried to look into the jaguar's vaccination records. Dude, I was in Mexico. What do you think? Some have asked how much I had to drink before it happened, and maybe that was a factor, maybe it wasn't. The real cause of the problem was me not understanding what the guy said was okay to do. People say "I bet you won't do that again!" Well no shit. I'm not saying putting your hand in a jaguar cage is a smart thing to do, but it really came down to my not understanding Spanish as well as I thought. Mr. Whitmer, my high school Spanish teacher would be so proud.