Krista Edelman woke around 6 a.m. on Aug. 20 and found a bat in her mouth while she was asleep beside her husband in Virginia. She pulled it out, threw it across the room and woke him up with a sentence no one expects to say before sunrise.
“I thought I was still dreaming,” Edelman said. Then the moment turned sharper. “It was like, my gosh, this is real life,” she said, after realizing the bat appeared to be trying to burrow between her lips and into her mouth.
Edelman, a Richmond gastroenterologist, later shared an Instagram video she described as “a bat PSA,” urging people to take possible bat exposure seriously. That warning landed because bats can carry rabies, a viral disease that attacks the nervous system and is almost always fatal once symptoms begin. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says contact with infected bats is the leading cause of human rabies deaths in the US, and at least 7 in 10 people who die from rabies in the US were infected by bats.
What made the encounter unnerving is that there may be no clear sign of danger. Bat bites can be tiny and may not leave an obvious mark, and a person who wakes up with a bat in a bedroom may not be able to tell whether they were bitten while sleeping. Edelman said she and her husband captured the bat so it could be tested, and the animal later tested negative for rabies.
Even so, the couple began preventive rabies treatment, a reminder that the immediate decision after an exposure is not always simple or comfortable. Edelman told WTVR that she felt humbled because she realized she was not entirely sure what steps to take after waking up with a bat in her mouth. “I think I know the basics of things,” she said. “And I was humbled about how I didn’t really know what to do in that situation.”
Her experience echoes a similar case in 2024, when an 11-year-old boy in Canada awoke at a family cottage in northern Ontario with a bat resting across his nose and mouth. He had no visible bite or scratch, and his family did not initially seek medical treatment. That is the part of these encounters that makes them hard to dismiss: by the time a person is awake, the warning may already be gone.
