Bedbugs: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

Hi everyone! We’re back to talking about bedbugs. I know, I wrote a blog about it a month ago where the heat treatment roasted them dead and I hadn’t seen any signs of them since. That’s still true . . mostly. But unfortunately, the damage from having bedbugs was not confined to the three days in which I actually knew I had them.

When you find out that someone—me, for example—has or has had bedbugs, you’re likely grossed out, maybe even freaked out. Maybe you wonder if you have them and do a little checking just to make sure. But trust me, when you know you really did have bedbugs, even if logically you know they should be dead and gone, your brain does not want to trust that.

So what do you do? If you’re me, you check your bed for the signs on the daily, even though the bedbug guys said you only need to check once a week when you wash your sheets. You can’t fall asleep at night because every itch or tickle makes you think there must be a bedbug on you, even though bedbugs aren’t usually active until the middle of the night because that’s when you’re sleeping deepest and least likely to disturb them as they feed. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you freak out even more BECAUSE THAT’S WHEN THE BUGS ARE MOST LIKELY TO BE EATING YOU, so you get up at 3:30 a.m. and turn on the light to thoroughly search your mattress, sheets, and pillow. You don’t find anything, but that doesn’t prevent you from having a hard time relaxing enough to go back to sleep.

Oh, and amongst all this, you start worrying that you have lice too, even though you haven’t seen any signs of lice and there’s zero reason to think that you have them, but if you had bedbugs, lice are the next logical step, right?

And you might think that you’re doing all this worrying for nothing, that your brain is being overactive. After all, there have been no signs of bedbugs (or lice).

Except.

Bites are still appearing on your body.

So there must be SOMETHING. And the logical explanation is bedbugs. Because you just had them. And bites that look the same as the ones you got when you had them are still appearing, so . . . But then why are there no other signs? There were a bare few weeks ago.

This has been my dilemma for the last month. According to one study cited to me by the bedbug guys (No Bull Pest Control, I should probably call them by their actual name), 90% of people who react to bedbug bites (50% of people don’t react at all) react within 48 hours of the bite. It’s possible that I’m just a very late reactor, but the fact that new bites have appeared every few days for the last four weeks freaked out my already freaked out brain even more. Because it doesn’t make sense. No signs of bedbugs besides these bites. A heat treatment that killed the crap out of everything that was here—and the No Bull people said that the problem was very small in the first place and there’s no reason to think that anything could have survived. But bites still showed up. So.

I don’t have an end to this story yet. To assuage my fears, I got a mattress encasement for my bed and bedbug interceptors for the feet of the bed. I was toying with the idea of getting a spray and some diatomaceous earth, but I decided to give No Bull a call first, and they sent someone out to spray for free. The guy checked my whole room for signs of bedbug nesting and didn’t find anything, so he thinks it might be some other kind of pest problem. The spray he mixed up works for general pests as well as bedbugs, so it should kill everything. Other possible suspects were mites (of the bird and dust variety), carpet beetles (although apparently they don’t bite?) and who knows what else. Oh, and also I could just be allergic to something. The No Bull spray treatment was the week of Thanksgiving, so I’m now giving it time to see if it makes a difference or if the bites keep showing up.

To anyone else who’s dealt with bedbugs or similar pest problems, I’m sorry! I’m usually good at putting bad experiences behind me once they’re over with, but this is one that’s proved hard to let go of. Partly, of course, because it seems to be ongoing. The one bright spot has been that No Bull has been awesome to work with. Kind, knowledgeable, willing to text at all hours, not annoyed by my constant barrage of paranoid questions. After the spray, the guy told me that if I keep getting bites, let him know and they’ll try something else—the heat treatment was plan A, the current spray was plan B, but they had more contingency plans ready if the problem wasn’t resolved. So if you have a pest problem, I highly recommend No Bull Pest Control!

Please 2020, end soon.