We were looking forward to our son staying with us in the Santa Barbara area during our vacation. His wife had the start of the school year as a teacher. My daughter also had a new year beginning at UC Berkeley where she works. It was just going to be our son joining us, which would have been unique, because we rarely if ever have time alone with him.

But it was not to be.

He was out for a walk in his neighborhood when he called to tell us a huge Rottweiler came up behind him and bit him in the thigh. He was pretty shaken up and his wife was driving him to urgent care.

At urgent care he asked about rabies vaccines while they tended to his bite.

The staff at urgent care said there hasn’t been a case of a dog with rabies in eight years in his county, so it wasn’t necessary. My son was reading about rabies online. It’s fatal so he was more than concerned. I told him to call his insurance or animal control. He couldn’t get through to animal control but did reach the County health department. They instructed him to go to an ER, not an urgent care, and get rabies vaccinations. They had a dog with rabies two weeks prior.

Also, since the dog was a stray, there was no way they could track the dog to see if it had rabies or not. It might have escaped a yard. Or it could truly be a stray dog with no home.

The other thing that was scary besides getting attacked and bitten by a dog, was my son discovered online that if insurance doesn’t cover rabies vaccines, they are ridiculously expensive.

He got the first rabies vaccine which was extremely painful. He said the needle was like a needle on a sewing machine and the diameter of the syringe was the size of a nickel. They stabbed him five or six times in the wound to fill the area with human rabies immune globulin. Then he got a shot in the arm with the rabies vaccine. He had to go back for more vaccines — which just happened to be during the time he took off work to join us at the beach.

The good news is he received treatment. At first I suggested that he follow the urgent care’s advice and not to worry about rabies vaccines. That was first of all, because I trusted their advice, and second, that the costs my son found online were around $36,000 for the shots!

He called the other day to say he got the bill from the ER. His bill was about $2,000. His health insurance covered $85,000. Yes, that’s $85,000 for two shots! He hasn’t received the bill yet for the rest of the shots.

What are your thoughts about shots to save your life costing more than $85,000?