Bedbug Q&As

First, a disclaimer. I’m not a pest control professional, a lawyer, an entomologist, or otherwise any sort of expert. Although to the best of my knowledge nothing below is untrue, I provide the information below “as is” without warranty of any kind, express or implied.

ARE THEY HERE?

How do I know if I have them? Adult bedbugs are brownish bugs roughly the size of an appleseed. Bedbugs, just like most any alive being, need to poop — except they poop in the form of dark streaks on bedding. If you’re not seeing their poop, or seeing molted skins, this is a good sign — not a surefire one, but a good one. If you need a bug identification, What’s That Bug? might be able to help, as well as the websites listed in response to this Ask Yahoo question. Keep in mind that they can hide in tons of things — they’re flat enough to hide in the pages of a book, if you can believe it. A professional inspection is the best route, in my opinion.

Can you detect a bedbug infestation by smell? With my particular infestation, I did not smell anything. However, crushing them produced a sickly sweet smell.

YEAH, THEY’RE HERE, NOW WHAT?

Why, or where, did I get them? You may be one of the lucky few who can know the source of their infestation. A neighbor who you know is infested, perhaps, or a recent instance of domestic or international travel. But for most, there’s no practical way by which you can conclusively know where the bedbugs came from. We live with the possibility of threat entering our lives all the time, though: you prepare for the worst and deal with it when it arrives, but you don’t let the possibilities kill your spirit or drive you batty.

How do I deal with my bedbug bites? I can’t offer much advice on this, but I can warn you from my own experience that excessive scratching of those bites, no matter how badly they itch, can severely retard the healing process and can, I’m told, possibly lead to scarring. If you have access to one, consult a physician.

Will they get into my hair? Are they in my pet’s fur? Bedbugs don’t like the scalp very much. From here: “Bed bugs can get in your hair but the good news is that they really don’t want to be there. Unlike fleas and lice that have bodies or claws that are specifically designed for navigating through hair, the common bedbug does not have these modifications. In fact, bedbugs need to set their front claws in a particular position so that they can insert their mouthparts into the skin just so, in order to be in the proper feeding position. Hair on the human head would make this very difficult. They would much prefer to feed on the bare skin. If they encountered your head first, they would most likely move to your face (many people suffer face bites) or some other less hairy area to feed. If you are bald, well, the head is fair game.” (To me, this also implies that furry pets may be relatively safe.)

What if I wake up and see them at night? You’re going to look at me like I’m batshit insane, but let me put it this way: they’re small, and icky, but they’re killable by even just your hands. Don’t be terrified by them, squish ‘em while saying “die die die die die die you fucker” (quietly if your spouse is asleep)! You’ll be surprised how pleasant vengeance can be.

LEAVING THEM BEHIND (PHYSICALLY)

I’m moving out of my infested apartment. I see you moved without bringing them along. How can I do that? I do not think there is a way you can be 100% sure that you will leave all your bedbugs behind when you move. Luck is involved. You can, however, minimize your chances as best you can. Essentially, what I did was to do everything I could to maximize the chances of me getting away bedbug-free. What I did was ask my exterminator how long the poison would be effective. I then resolved to move before the poison “expired,” which for me was about six to eight weeks after spraying. Spraying for bedbugs usually involves emptying bookshelves and videoshelves, so that each crack and crevice of furniture can be sprayed. After the spraying, I unpacked everything (despite my upcoming move) so that any bedbugs that might’ve been in any of the things I packed up (between books’ pages, etc.) would hunger, seek me out as food, cross the poison, and die. I then, shortly before my move, repacked, left, and crossed my fingers. I was able to keep my clothes in another, supposedly uninfested apartment next door after they were cleaned, although I had to move them back before I moved. That is pretty much all I did. It is also going to be a function both of the size of your infestation and of luck. If you have a lighter infestation, it’s fair (I think, in my layman’s opinion) to say that your chances of moving without bringing them with you are better than if the infestation is, say, heavy. It also really is a matter of luck. From what I understand, there are people who have left behind everything they’ve owned — literally everything, even dressing in rather skimpy clothes — and still somehow manage to either (a) bring the bugs with them, or (b) have stumbled into a new infestation. That’s not something that happens each and every time, of course; in fact, my impression is that that sort of bad luck is a rare event. But I mention it only to convey that there is a certain degree to which you cannot control this.

I’m not planning on moving out. Do I have to, in order to escape them? Well, it’s useful. But in 99.9% of infestations, it’s not practical for you. Most people do not move after their bedbug infestation. The key question is: how is your landlord treating the problem? If you live in an apartment, it is so likely as to be probable that you got your infestation from another infested apartment in your building. (Although, granted, pure common sense dictates that someone had to at some point bring them in from the outside, to start that chain.) Your landlord needs to not only be treating you but making sure the apartments of your neighbors — both vertically (upstairs and downstairs neighbors) and horizontally (next-door neighbors) are checked. If not, then you may end up being reinfested, since bedbug poisons are often barrier kills. If you learn that they’re not doing this and they balk at the other inspections, you might want to point out that catching infestations early via inspection is usually less expensive than building-wide treatments (although a pest control professional could no doubt give them more accurate pricing). Especially beware the landlords who have a “friend” come in and spritz around with a keg of bug spray. Bedbugs are not a bug you want to leave to the amateurs, and such treatment isn’t very effective.

I THINK THEY’RE BACK!

They’ve sprayed, but I’ve seen a bug! AAGH! The spray that was laid down (assuming your exterminator did it right) is almost always a “barrier kill,” meaning that the bedbugs cross over the spray of poison and absorb the poison at the time of their crossing, which will shortly (but not immediately) kill them. This may not be relevant depending on what your exterminator has said and what type of poison he applied (and how he applied it), but you may wish to see if the number of live bedbugs you see tapers off over the following days before you conclude there’s a new problem.

My bedbugs are gone, but my I feel like I’m still being bitten. What you are experiencing is very common. I experienced it too. Your body may still be knitting up its skin and healing. If I am remembering things correctly, what our bodies react to with bedbug “bites” is not an actual reaction to a bite — in other words, it is not that insect mandibles pierce our flesh and our bodies are trying to close a wound. It is a reaction — I think an allergic one — to the saliva which the bedbugs injected into us (that serves as a painkiller and anticoagulant). So, physiologically, I expect that (i) the healing process and (ii) the allergic process might be contributing to these feelings.

How can I prevent myself from ever being infested again? I don’t think you can effectively prevent bedbug infestations with a 100% success rate. Like any natural force, you cannot prevent tornados or hurricanes or floods. However, this Ask Metafilter question had some creative ideas, including putting your luggage in the hotel room’s bathtub. Often, if people have to deal with bedbugs at a hotel, they will complain on certain websites (TripAdvisor, etc.) about their experience, leaving a record of that infestation you can then discover prior to going there. (For example, you could look for bedbug-related articles on HotelChatter, or look in TripAdvisor’s hotel reviews or message forums.) It also never hurts to call a hotel and be frank with them: explain you’ve recently dealt with a bedbug infestation and have no desire to ever see them again. I wouldn’t just ask them “do you have bedbugs?”. No matter whether they do or not, they’ll almost certainly say “no.” I would instead ask them what measures they take to prevent their hotel rooms from being infested by bedbugs, and see if you’re satisfied by the answers.

LEAVING THEM BEHIND (EMOTIONALLY)

They don’t want to hurt you. They’re not malicious creatures – they’re not smart enough to have intent. You and I, as animals borne to this earth, we have desires. We need to fill our stomachs with food and water, because we do not want to die. Much of humanity also has a sex drive, which was biologically hardwired in order to encourage procreation. That’s all the bedbugs are trying to do. They want to eat food, and our carbon dioxide and body heat sends the same mental signals to them as the smell of a good turkey dinner does to us. They are not attacking you because they want you to hurt. They are not attacking you to destroy you. They’re trying to eat and drink and have bedbug kids (as gross as that latter thought is). Now, their way of life is so incompatible with ours – parasitic, in fact – that it’s either them or us … but the revelation lies in that there is no malice there, no intent. There are just the very same instincts that we coo over when it results in kittens and puppies — but instincts operating in a way that, in this case, happens to hurt us. For me, realizing this helped me feel a little better — it helped stop me picturing them as this massive evil force ruining my life.

Once you realize there’s no intent, just instinct, things can become easier. For example, you may hear from others how bedbugs can survive without food for 18 months. A horrifying thought. But then ask yourself – if they operate only on instinct, why would they not feed? That abstinence ability of theirs kicks in only when food isn’t available. It’s how long they can survive without food — not how long before they get hungry again. They’re going to search out food if they can’t find it, just like how if we’re in a neighborhood where there’s no restaurants, and it’s lunchtime, we’re gonna try to track something down, as opposed to sticking in that neighborhood and waiting for food to show up. They’re not going “ah, furniture nearby, I’ll wait for humans,” as if it was the equivalent of a deer’s watering hole.

Your instinctual desire to fight or run. You don’t have the ability to literally physically fight bedbugs (aside from the occasional squish) because they’re so myriad in number. Your animal hindbrain is worried that the predator is still hanging around your watering hole, and your senses are on very high alert looking for any sign whatsoever that the cheetah is rustling through the grass to pounce on you. The problem is, we don’t just have animal brains, we have human brains, and the human computer is scanning everything in your environment and everything that passes through your senses and canvassing it, with a sense of desperation, for the possibility that it could be an attack by the old familiar predator. Our mental computers are so overpowered compared to an animal’s mental computer that the fight-or-flight thing can go a little overboard with us when we really don’t want it to.

Try not fighting the fear. It’s worth a try. Your fear is perfectly acceptable, and even entirely natural. Bedbugs attack us when we are sleeping, and the caveman brain inside all of us associates sleep with us being at our most vulnerable. Thus, the caveman part of is profoundly unnerved by being attacked while we sleep, and that’s why I think bedbugs give all of mankind a case of the mega-shudders. Trying to squish your fear or push it away sometimes only makes it dig in. Try instead saying to yourself, “I am feeling this fear because I am worried about bedbugs coming along with me, and that reason is a understandable one. I am going to let myself feel this way and let it burn itself out for now, but I also know that [insert a few reasons why it's not likely here].” We heal. Our reactions lessen into inconsequentialness. In the meantime, the trick is to be profoundly patient with yourself — and while you don’t let the anxiety and fear run rampant, screaming and gibbering all over your psyche, you also at the same time tell it that you acknowledge its right to exist.

Another anti-anxiety trick. You may also want to try this trick: put a rubber band on your wrist. Every time you feel your anxiety going out of control, close your eyes, snap the rubber band against your wrist, envision a big red stop sign, and mentally shout “STOP.” Don’t do it to the point where you’re making your wrist raw, but it’s a useful technique for derailing the anxious thoughts.

Widening the scale. Also, when I dealt with my infestation, an odd quirk of fate helped me — at the time I was dealing with my own bedbug problem, Katrina was occurring. It helped me realize that as scary as this was for me, there were many more godawful things I could have been forced to deal with. There are soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, who would love to have their only problem right now be a bedbug infestation.

Post-traumatic stress disorder. Guess what? It’s likely you’re dealing with bonafide post-traumatic stress disorder. You’re not dishonoring soldiers or anything by recognizing that: it’s not a disorder just limited to the battlefield. You had a trauma. It’s after that trauma (”post-trauma”), and the part of your brain that handles the emotional stress associated with that incident (”stress”) isn’t processing that stress correctly, and is instead letting it build up and build up (”disorder”). And so you’ve not emotionally got yourself out of that situation. You’re re-experiencing it.

You need a friendly professional to sit down with and listen to you and help you get your mind to stop living through that over and over again. Cost can be not too bad at all — it can be free depending on your health plan, cheap if it’s not (many, many therapists offer sliding scales). If it’s just impossible for you for one reason or another, there’s The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook, which is one of the most recommended and best books out there for dealing with recalcitrant anxiety. But don’t let the book be a stand-in for a professional, if there’s any way you can pull that off.

Really overestimating how bad it is, based on the Internet. The Internet can conflict with our caveman hindbrain — it involves the way that humanity has been trained to aggregate and draw inferences from information. Our minds don’t accurately determine how rare a quality or situation is if we’re immersed in examples of it, because our hindbrain isn’t used to being exposed to mass thought and trends.

For example, in 2001, I had outpatient surgery for a minor condition. However, I thought it would be wise to research this minor condition upon my diagnosis. Upon doing so, I found websites devoted to people who had this condition recurring over and over again for them despite surgery, and discussions of how painful they found the surgery, and generally received the impression from these websites that this was going to be Hell on Earth. This naturally made my level of anxiety shoot through the roof for a few solid months — before, during, and even after the surgery. (There were a few complicating factors that didn’t help, such as the surgeon having a horrendous bedside manner, but the root of the anxiety was what I read on these websites.) Indeed, despite a relatively easy healing process and recovery, it took a later visit to an entirely different surgeon to convince me that the problem would never recur. Once I heard that, the anxiety in my head turned off almost literally like a switch.

I had failed to realize: people who experience problems with a situation will always be far better represented on the Internet than people for whom a process goes smoothly. If you are experiencing problems of any sort — medical or otherwise — your urge is to bitch about it, and to seek assistance. If you are not experiencing problems, what do you have to complain about? For the most part, there’s no urge to seek others out and go, “Hey, it went pretty well.”

I had also failed to realize: if you’re in a community where 50 people from all over the Internet are complaining about Complication #XYZ of Surgery #ABC, then our minds subconsciously say to themselves, “The normal pool of people I interact with physically is roughly [insert relatively small number here]. If 50 people are experiencing this problem, this is a common problem.” That subconscious level of our minds hasn’t realized that the number of people in the Western world with access to the Internet is probably about hundreds of millions of people, and in such a pool, 50 is insignificantly small.

If you then realize this and tell your brain this, your conceptual framing of the situation suddenly changes drastically.

Bedbugs Taking Over the World! Film at 11. Remember that any news outlet loves to sensationalize. That’s not to say that there isn’t a worldwide uptick in bedbug infestations, but the news media is not trying to give you a straight news story when they report about bedbugs — they’re doing one of their usual routines: “A common household product in your cabinet could kill you and maim your kids! Which one is it? We’ll tell you at 10!”

Also, keep in mind that the more widespread a problem bedbugs become, the more pressure there will be on the pesticide community and the exterminator communities to find more widespread, efficient, and easier ways of dealing with bedbug infestations. Given their spread, there is now real money to be made in finding more efficient cures and/or preventatives than currently exist. For the longest time, DDT took care of it, so there was no money to be made. Now there is, and I would not be surprised to find the pest control industries coming up with better, more efficient ways of exterminating the bedbugs.

Really overestimating how likely they are to come back. The thing that helped me come to relative peace about that possibility is this: Take a larger view of the probabilities and possibilities. This isn’t Fate on the attack. Your infestation was just one factor bouncing around in the universe and hitting another factor, and the combination of the two hits a third factor, and … boom. I don’t know what caused it with me, but let’s make a fake example. Let’s say it was this: one night, a homeless man slept in a homeless shelter. But he happened to lie down next to someone else who had bedbugs. Boom, that’s one place where Fate split. He could have not lay next to someone, but he did. A few bedbugs crawled over and got on him. He didn’t shower that day (boom – he could’ve showered). Then, he got out of the cold weather by getting onto an subway car (boom – he might’ve gone elsewhere). He sat down on one of the seats (boom – he could’ve stayed standing). One or two of the bedbugs decided to try for another person, so crawled off of the guy (boom – it could’ve tried to get to him by looking for openings in his clothing). Circumstances in my life led me to get onto that same car (boom – could’ve been a different car) and sit in that seat (boom – could’ve been a different seat). The bedbug crawled onto me (boom – could’ve targeted someone else) and didn’t shake off on the way home (boom – could’ve been brushed off by any one of a number of things).

There you go: that was nine places just off the top of my head where that story could have forked and resulted in (me) not being bedbug-infested. And each of those places have forks branching off them, too. Why did I get on that car? Well, I stayed late (boom) because I didn’t get some work done (boom) and my boss said he needed it tomorrow (boom) and … Yes, you and I can play the game a little better now, knowing of that danger — but I suppose the feeling is this:

If, in the future, another eleven or twelve factors manage to clash into each other in just the right combination that I get bedbugs once more, then … that’s just what’ll happen. I can try to avoid the factors clashing into each other in just the right combination to give me another infestation, but great or horrible things can happen depending on what variables click with each other, and we can’t control them because we can’t control life to that minute of a degree.

The Gwyneth Paltrow movie “Sliding Doors” is an excellent example of this concept, and illustrates the point well. And, it’s a good movie too.

MY OWN STORY

How did you get them? I believe it’s possible that I brought them home with me from a sleep study performed at a downtown Chicago hotel in late February 2005. However, to the best of my recollection, I seem to remember being bitten beginning in April 2005 — which wouldn’t mesh with the hotel hypothesis, as I would’ve most likely been bitten beginning shortly after bringing them home, not two months later. (It’s for that reason amongst others that I won’t name the hotel.) In any case, my doctor identified bites which I had thought were mosquito bites on August 9, 2005. I went home that day and lifted my box spring out of my bed frame to find a large number of bedbugs crawling up and down the strip of the boxspring’s bottom which had formerly been shadowed from the sun by the metal of the bedframe.

Did they ever come back to your apartment? I moved as quickly as I safely could after my infestation, because I wasn’t convinced my landlady was going to adequately treat my apartment or building. I think they probably did reinfest the space or infest other apartments in that building, but if they did, I wasn’t there any longer. My landlady was originally going to treat the apartment by having a “guy” who worked at one of her other buildings come by and spray. She wouldn’t tell me what the insecticide was, and she used the word “fumigate,” which is not how you treat bedbugs. I offered to go halfsies on the cost with her if she let me choose the exterminator; she agreed. Afterwards, she indicated to me that she wouldn’t inspect the other apartments until nearly two months later, and that this would not be a exterminator’s inspection for bedbugs but merely her own inspection of units. I didn’t feel this would be sufficient to halt any spread from apartment to apartment, and so I asked her to let me out of my lease; she did, and I moved.

Where were your bites? They were on my back and arms, primarily.

Can you tell me more about your infestation? As I wrote about it here while I was dealing with it, yes, I definitely can do that. Here they are.

WRAP-UP

After reading the above and your blog entries, I still have a question. Can you help? I must admit that I am not wild about talking about bedbugs with people. It remains a very unpleasant memory. That having been said, since I went through the trauma myself, I know how upsetting and disruptive an experience it can be, and I can’t turn my back on someone in that situation who needs help. But I suggest you check a website called Bedbugger first. They have an excellent FAQ which provides much, much more information than I knew at the time of infestation, and they also have message forums. You may also want to look at Wikipedia’s bedbug article. But if, after you’ve looked over these, there’s still something I can answer for you, please go ahead and ask me — keeping in mind that as I said, I’m not a pest control professional, a lawyer, an entomologist, or otherwise any sort of expert, and just an average schlub like you. I’ll try to help you as best I can.

What’s the best advice you can give me? Remember that this is a finite problem. It will not last forever, even in the worst-case scenario that you need multiple sprayings. You will get out the other end of this, and there will be a day in the future where you are living life as you once did, except that this time, you’ll realize how sweet normalcy can be … and life will be all the sweeter, and you will be all the happier, thanks to that realization.

Any resources on the Web you can recommend for me?