I was reminded this morning by a friend of two simple truths. First, I have handled this situation extremely well. I’ve done pretty much all I could to end bedbugs’ existence inside my apartment. And because of this, second, there’s no reason to think that I won’t handle the situation similarly well if it continues to happen again.
It’s also worthwhile to note that if it happens again, there’s no logical reason to extrapolate that into an endless cycle of bedbug exterminations for the rest of my life. Right now, I’m characterizing the worst-case scenario either as me bringing them with me into a new apartment, or me being forestalled from a move by a sudden recurrence right prior to moving. If I bring them with me into a new apartment, then the deal simply will be to exterminate them again. Looking at that same survey information I linked to before (which I remind myself is unpublished and thus to be taken with a grain of salt), then any infestations should be taken care of with a threefold spraying. An annoying expense of time, effort, and money — but not infinite in nature!
In other words, I need to remind myself that a scenario of an infinite loop of extermination until I become insolvent is an entirely irrational scenario. There will be an end to the tunnel … and there is a high probability that the way I am handling it now will end it now, and not end it later.
There are no definites in this world. I have to learn that I am capable enough to handle almost all uncertainties, including the ones that unsettle me.
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I had a bit of an unpleasant experience last night right before going to bed. I was sitting right where I am now, in a black mesh chair — the one with the arm that fell off last weekend. (I’m not certain if I blogged about that particular comedy of errors.) I felt something on my back and I assumed that it was just my body producing a phantom crawling sensation. Nevertheless, I reached behind me to where I felt the crawling sensation on the chair, because this sensation felt as if it had some depth to it.
And, sure enough, there was something indeed underneath my hand. While keeping my hand where it was, I rotated my body out of the chair and then looked at what I had underneath my hand. I managed to squish it while I was doing so, and it turned out to be a live bedbug. I also then noticed towards the top of the cushion yet another bedbug. It had odd coloring — it had a sort of apricot hue with a white patch near its top, so much so that I thought (and still wonder if) it might be a certain kind of ladybug I’ve occasionally seen at my parents’ household. That, however, when squished, also yielded the sickly sweet smell that supposedly can be corroborated with bedbugs.
Their appearance puts me at great unease. Specifically, I am wondering why these bedbugs are not dead. The first round of poison has been laid down in the apartment for two weeks now (officially, as of today), and the exterminator comes tomorrow to spray the second batch. I am wondering how they got there, and how they did not die. I am thinking it would be wise to trash this chair, especially considering it is on its last legs already, but I also wonder if my cat tracked the bedbugs onto the chair from his carrier, which has a carpeted bottom and was brought away from the house (with him, to the vet) during the first spraying.
Moreover, I am finding that the extremely high level of anxiety associated with the thought of never being rid of them is coming back to me. I had felt a level of equilibrium return to me over the past week or so. I had thought to myself that they were dead, and I would be able to begin to replace furniture, to return my apartment to relatively normal status, and, eventually, to begin a new life in a new apartment with no bedbugs in sight, an apartment where I could better accomplish goals I sought to do, goals that would better my life.
Now, the spectre of continually fighting these bugs over and over again, as fees and furniture replacements drain my money, again begins to frighten me. And while I know there are others in this world at this moment who have it far worse than I do, there are people in this world who are “shiny happy people,” as REM once contemptuously called them, and I wouldn’t mind being one right about now.
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It’s a few minutes shy of midnight on Friday evening. I’ve just finished watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the last two episodes of the third season of Oz, and I’m about to go to bed.
I’m also now firmly convinced that I’ve got a pretty bad cold. My left eye is consistently tearing up, I keep sneezing and my nose keeps running like a sieve, and I feel hot as heck. And my apartment gets resprayed on Tuesday, so there’s no way I’m not going to work! I hope like hell that I feel better tomorrow.
And somehow I even feel guilty typing those words when humanity is evidently going to hell in a big-ass handbasket down in New Orleans. It seems selfish to want better conditions for my own life when other people’s lives have gone so horrendously wrong so suddenly. I’ve not blogged about New Orleans or Katrina that much — I figure we’re in media saturation on it already, and there’s not much for me to add to the discussion; I don’t have much to say.
From all accounts, the national sentiment seems like an extended version of 9/11 — the country waits and wonders what the death toll is going to be, and in the meantime rallies around in telethons and blood and financial donations and volunteer efforts, showing its nobler side. I’m glad of that. I’m glad that as a people we can be counted on to do this, to help out our fellow man. I think with this cold donating blood is out of the question, but I anticipate donating some dough once I figure out my budget this weekend.
Although, surprise, surprise, I keep wondering … how much more resources could we be assisting New Orleans with if everybody wasn’t already over in Iraq? We’ve got about 99% of our military over there, so much so that recruiting for the war is desperate, so it stands to reason that manpower’s pretty damn short on the ground. And I remember reading some stuff recently about how Congress approved funding for flood prevention in New Orleans in ‘95, but its funds got raided for homeland security post-2001.
So … yeah, surprise surprise, I’m figuring a way to point the finger at the person I could seriously contemplate as the anti-Christ of Christian mythology, George W. Bush. Seems counterproductive as I write it — divisive and inappropriate — but what can I say? For the love of Pete, that man has done more to damage the country I love than any individual I’ve ever met, and I want so very much for him and his ilk to have power over this country no more. I want to be proud of my country and my government. That’s why I love Dave and The American President and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The West Wing and The Contender and any other movie full of political idealism and the idea that, yeah, our government could work. We could have someone in there who cares.
“I wouldn’t give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn’t have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a little looking out for the other fella, too.”
— Sen. Jefferson Smith
I’m off to clean up some Kleenex, swallow some Tylenol, and pray that my body uses the extra sleep time to kick this bug out of my system. G’night.
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A friend of mine recently inquired of me about my reaction to the bedbugs. I wrote back to them a reply, and it occurred to me upon reading it that it might also make a good blog entry. I wrote:
I suppose the answer I have to give you is simply that the creation of this reinfestation scenario is not a product of my rational mind; it is a product of my irrational fears, and is not easily vanquishable.
After I had surgery a few years ago, I kept finding myself obsessively thinking that the cause of the surgery was going to come back. After several months’ worth of “will it or won’t it?”-style anxiety, I visited a surgeon who examined me and told me definitively that it wouldn’t be coming back. Fortunately, those words let me shut off the fear in my mind surrounding that issue like a switch.
Unfortunately, that kind of definitive answer isn’t available to me here. I can’t completely and entirely rule out the chance of reinfestation, although the likelihood of being reinfested from an insect surviving this “wave” will most likely decline heavily within the next few weeks.
Is it likely that I will infest whatever my new home is? No, it is not. I can rationally tell myself that anything that feeds based on instinct (without thought or consciousness to moderate its hunger) will not choose to survive without food just because it can … so that although bedbugs have the ability to survive without feeding for up to 18 months, they should normally start hungering for blood about once a week. Thus, one could assume that if there were bedbug survivors that stowed away in boxes or laundry, they would grow hungry, seek to feed on me within a week or two, cross the sprayed poison, and die, resulting in an eventually bedbug-free apartment. Perhaps my conscious mind can combat my irrational fears using that line of thought.
It doesn’t help that there’s really nothing I can do to actively prevent being infested again, other than realizing that the odds are hopefully in my favor (eight years in a city, and I only was infested once). But it is supremely frustrating that the practical side of my mind has nothing to latch onto in that regard, given that I have no idea how they came to me in the first place. I have no idea if it was from the hotel where I had the sleep study done (if so, why did they hold off for months before feeding?), or if I did catch them in a theater, or if I somehow came into contact with a heavily infested individual, or if I was in a heavily infested place, or if they traveled to me from another apartment in my building.
If I had a definitive answer to where I got them, I could probably rest more easily, because I could then simply avoid that circumstance in the future, or take more caution in it. (For example, if I knew they came from another apartment in my building, I could take comfort in the fact that I’d soon be out of there. If I knew that they came from that sleep study bed, I could take comfort in the fact that I could inspect future hotel beds I stayed in, and that I could do any future sleep studies in a hospital if need be. And so on.)
With regards to those possible causes mentioned above, I actually found myself irrationally worrying about movie theaters and about domestic and international travel (my plans to visit family, and to eventually visit Ireland, respectively) and whether these actions would bring about bedbugs. There’s some irrational avoidance going on in my mind surrounding that stuff, and I’m trying to work against that in my own way, by sort of “defying myself” — taking steps to defy my own anxiety.
For example, I purposefully went to go see a movie last Friday in order to hopefully dispel the ‘movie theater’ fear. (I think it worked.) And the only reason why I am not traveling this weekend is because I’m just dead tired — and also because I’ve not replaced my suitcase yet. (I tossed out the old one after finding a bedbug on its outside and possibly seeing some nymphs inside one of the pockets.)
The overlying theme here is that this is not something I can unfortunately just quickly dismiss from my mind through willpower … but I’m working on it. I can fight the fear with my brain, but I can’t (yet) rule it. I sometimes find it hard to dismiss catastrophic scenarios involving bad personal experiences from my mind. I imagine that’s normal.
But the good thing about all this is that all of my brain isn’t totally immersed in the anxiety. There is a separate part of me that goes, “Wait a minute. Let’s examine this situation. Let’s take a step out of the feedback loop and try to evaluate the facts of the situation, and not just go apeshit.”
As time passes and bedbugs fade more and more into my past, I imagine I will be able to let my worry about them fade significantly down. By that I mean that … well, I still do regret the loss of [a girl I once knew] every once in a while, and I still do find myself wondering every once in a while if the cause of that surgery has returned. But neither have a great deal of emotional impact on me anymore. Neither cause my brain to start ramping up the feelings really high. They’re easily dealt with, and very short-lived — a brief thought, a matter of seconds.
And I imagine that this will what will happen to me with the bedbugs, assuming I don’t ever get reinfested and successfully move. I will probably find myself wondering every once in a while about them, and being cautious about them, and inspecting my boxspring a bit more than I ever did before — but all less so as time goes on.
At least, that’s what path I hope this whole thing takes!
[EDIT: Upon reading this entry after posting it, it occurred to me that the "medical condition" I spoke of sounds like I had cancer. I didn't. It was a medical condition that has a possibility of recurrence, but was not potentially fatal.]
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