The funniest story you'll ever hear about rabies and undiagnosed illness

Rabies isn't funny. But, somehow, Heather Swain makes her story about her brush with rabies absolutely hilarious.

Now Swain didn't have rabies, but she did have a lot of the symptoms that go along with it. In this Story Collider piece, she talks about her experience being "that patient with a mystery disease" and what it's like when nobody actually figures out what's making you sick.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE: health • medicine • mysteries • personal stories • Science • Story Collider

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cdh1971

This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode in which Elaine gets nipped by a dog and within an hour or so develops rabies symptoms consistent with her reckoning of what rabies is. Of course, the woman here actually had some mystery sickness while Elaine was simply being Elaine.

I’ve read somewhere (maybe here on BB) that native Amazonians who eat bats for protein have a natural resistance to the rabies virus, and perhaps ten percent of the hunters have an outright immunity.
Boundegar

Rabies is definitely funny when Chuck Pahlaniuk gets his hands on it.
niktemadur

There’s an old film where Glenn Ford gets rabies in the desert. Finding a source of water becomes a point of suspense, as Ford is hesitant to approach and drink, because you know, hydrophobia, get it? I thought that was absurd, but as it turns out, swallowing becomes extremely difficult, so yeah, water is a problem.
Atomicpanda

That was a good listen. My own rabies story is also funny in hindsight, but much shorter.