I have a fear of rodents.

That probably isn’t surprising since, on average, most females are. My fear stems not so much from a normal, rational fear of rodents. I have much different, but equally rational, fears.

Rodent Fear #1: Sitting to go to the bathroom and having some animal bite me. For this reason, I will not go to the restroom without first turning on the light (e.g. in the middle of the night) and lifting up the toilet lid to make sure nothing is sitting in there waiting to bite my butt. This is particularly bad in the middle of the night because everyone knows that’s when things attack you and because it’s such an inconvenience to turn on the light in the middle of the night. It’s much easier to go back to sleep if one does not have to face such brightness. Still…I couldn’t go back to sleep if something bit me so I’d rather have the light on and avoid it.

I have no idea where I got the idea that some sort of animal would be swimming around in the toilet waiting for me, but since I was about 12 years old, I have had a fear of that. This has never happened to me, nor have I heard of it happening to anyone else. The knowledge that the toilet water somehow gets back outside to the open world again causes my fear that the reverse could also be true; that the outside world could come into my toilet.

Rodent Fear #2: Having a mouse crawl out of my tub faucet. It’s possible. I read it in a book once, a true book. There was an entire chapter dedicated to the killing and disposal of the mouse that crawled out of the tap and ran around in the tub. I would not be so scared of this except that the author of the book used the same method that I would use and it didn’t work.

I cannot handle killing things by any touching form, i.e. squishing with my shoe, swatting with a swatter, crushing under a napkin. So I have always used a handy little (or rather, very large) can of spray that my dad has for the barn. Granted, the spray is for horse flies, insects, etc., but there is a hazard warning on the label to avoid getting in your eyes and to see a doctor immediately if you come in contact with it. That would lead me to assume that anything that comes in contact with it, human or not, would also be in danger, especially since I have choked before over the amount of spray that I’ve blasted at a daddy long leg spider. But I found out in the book that it did not work on the mouse. It just made the mouse more mad and the tub more slick so that the mouse slid around in a fury.

So I am back to square one with this fear because my “in case” solution won’t work. Good news though, I did some further investigation and have come across a possible method for killing in case I need it (no, drowning doesn’t work for mice). This is what the author did after he used a whole can of Raid. “My Maglite flashlight was by the front door. Instinctively, I ran out and grabbed it, then came back into the bathroom and turned off the light. It was a crazy idea that came to me out of thin atmosphere. I didn’t question it; I only complied.

“I turned on the flashlight and made a dancing pattern on the water, disco style. I turned the light on and off, on and off. I made the light zigzag across the water; and the rat/thing began to tremble. It began to seize.

“I began making vigorous, complex patterns on the water. I drew crosshatches made of light. I made figure eights. I shined the light into the rat/thing’s eyes, then flicked it off and on again like a strobe.

“Miraculously, beautifully, the rat/thing became confused or epileptic. It had what I can only assume was a heart attack. Twitch, twitch, twitch, the little body shaking while the skinny whiskers tapped the air.

“And then it died.” (taken from the writings of Augusten Burroughs)

Now that I know this might work, I must invest in a Maglite flashlight. Maybe another can of Raid too, just in case.

Rodent Fear #3: My third, and possibly greatest, fear is that there is a rodent stuck in the shower head pipe. A plumber said vermin sometimes climb up into the plumbing and get trapped in the shower head!!! That mean I may have been showering, may still be showering, may someday be showering with piping-hot water filtered through a dead rat, without even knowing it!! The thought makes me shudder. The plumber said that these things happen to people “all the time.”

I have decided that someday if I build a house, I will have an especially integral role of house-owner-inspecting-the-plumber’s-work. If a buy an already-built house, I will have to have a plumber inspect all the pipes and shower heads and maybe come up with some sort of water tank isolation system. Maybe I will just boil my own water and take baths with Evian.

The past few days have been especially bad since I heard a mouse in the ceiling of my bathroom the other morning. He was in the bathroom fan, scratching around with much gusto. I now perform a full tub inspection before every shower. But there’s only so much I can inspect. For all I know, he’s stuck in the shower head and I am left checking my skin for hairs and whiskers.