Did the dog have rabies? How should I know?

HOLIDAY DISASTERS: I LAUGHED WHEN the nurse in the Tropical Medical Bureau suggested a rabies vaccine before a trip to Ecuador. “Hardly necessary, thank you.” A month later, as the frantic black dog was chasing my bike down the Andes towards the rainforest, I began to reassess my decision.

The animal looked sick and weary, but something was goading it irrationally on, driven as if by delirium. Its bloodshot eyes were locked relentlessly on to me and its barking had the air of anguish turned to anger.

I could feel the hot saliva on my ankle as its jaw tore through my skin and the bike keeled into the dirt. Had a truck not come hurtling along at that moment, frightening the dog back into the jungle, I would have been badly mauled. As it was, I was left bruised and muddied, with blood spurting from my leg.

I clambered down to the Rio Pastaza and stuck my bleeding foot into the roaring water until I remembered the piranha and pulled it out again quickly. I urinated on the wound to disinfect it, rubbing a bit of earth in to help it congeal. I knew if I got on the bike again the wound would re-open and so I limped back up to the track and waited for a jeep to give me a lift back to the nearest village.

By the following day the cut was healing well and I wandered up to some volcanic hot pools for a soak. One of the Salasaca Indians bathing there saw my wound and grew concerned. He suggested I get his mother to put a poultice on it or go to a clinic.

At the clinic, the nurse asked me if the dog had rabies. How should I know? She told me that Ecuador had one of the highest rates of rabies in the world; an eradication programme had been running, but the marginal zone buffering the forest had yet to be tackled.

She said I could get a rabies test, but by the time the results were back I might already be dead. It all depended how quickly it reached my brain – it needed anything from a few days to a few months to incubate and then to travel up my spinal column. My neurons would slowly turn to jelly, killing me. I was lucky I had been bitten on the ankle, she said, as the virus had a long way to travel before it could activate.

She promised me I would be fine for five days; after that, no one could tell. The vital thing was not to get excited or stressed as it might speed up the onset. Ideally, I should get the vaccine immediately, which the government was giving out free.

It involved fourteen shots in the stomach of a compound made from the brain tissue of infected sheep. It was as painful as rabies but at least you lived. The clinic had none in supply, but I could get some in the missionary hospital in Puyo, an oil-mining town in the jungle.

Back in my backpacker hostel I started hearing stories about the vaccine: how the shots tore through the nervous system like barbed bullets and how people had been known to take their own lives rather than endure it. The first few shots were okay, but as the abdominal spasms and muscle aches became more excruciating with each shot, the patient lost the will to live. I feared I couldn’t hack it.

“If you can find the dog and check he’s vaccinated, you’re fine,” a doctor told me. “But make sure you actually see the certificate; don’t just take someone’s word.”

If I couldn’t find a cert, he advised me to monitor the dog for a few days and if it remained calm and wasn’t frothing, I should be fine. Ideally, though, I ought to cut out some of its brain and bring it to the clinic where it could be tested straight away. The vital thing was to act immediately, as I was assured of only five days before swelling pupils and hallucinations might set in. The worst part is said to be just before total paralysis, when the mind starts to fear water and the patient refuses to drink – there follows a slow death from thirst over a few days.

The following day was day three and I set out on an open-sided jalopy of a bus along the same dirt track I’d cycled before, trying to work out where in the endless curtain of forest the dog had attacked me. An Israeli backpacker had given me his bowie knife in case I needed to extract some brain, but I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.

Ideally, I’d recognise the spot somehow, and find a shack nearby, run perhaps by some lonely gold digger or evangelist who would bring me out back to show me their dog who had run away but who was now back home and fully healthy. They would show me their bright pink vaccination certificate and everything would be okay. I would be free to continue my self-absorbed wandering through South America.

I’d like to end with that image of a happy conclusion to a minor adventure, only it wouldn’t be true. Instead, what followed were three of the most panicked days of my life, of chasing dogs, then vaccines, then army medi-vacs and finally money to pay for it all.

Thanks to numerous doctors, soldiers, diplomats, bankers and my mother (as rescue-mission coordinator back home), I managed to get the medication just in time. It was a pioneering, new three-shot cure, each shot to be taken a month apart, which necessitated settling down somewhere with a fridge to keep them cool, and this was how I ended up running an organic hostel on border of Ecuador and Peru – an experience that changed my life in so many ways. Without rabies I would never have found that hostel and my life would be very different. It highlighted yet again for me the fact that disasters abroad can be one of life’s great gifts – an opportunity to show who we really are beyond the safety net that cushions us at home.