In the midst of all the bedbug fun (I am seeing dead bug corpses amidst the apartment, and having insane glee at the thought — DIE, you fuckers, DIE DIE DIE!), I got forwarded this quite little fun bit at work:
The Guys’ Rules
At last a guy has taken the time to write this all down. Finally, the guys’ side of the story… (I must admit, it’s pretty good.)
We always hear “the rules” from the female side. Now here are the rules from the male side.
These are our rules!
Please note … these are all numbered “1″ on purpose!
1. Men ARE not mind readers.
1. Learn to work the toilet seat. You’re a big girl. If it’s up, put it down. We need it up, you need it down. You don’t hear us complaining about you leaving it down.
1. Sunday sports. It’s like the full moon or the changing of the tides.
Let it be.
1. Shopping is not a sport. And no, we are never going to think of it that way.
1. Crying is blackmail.
1. Ask for what you want. Let us be clear on this one: Subtle hints do not work! Strong hints do not work! Obvious hints do not work! Just say it!
1. ‘Yes’ and ‘no’ are perfectly acceptable answers to almost every question.
1. Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it. That’s what we do. Sympathy is what your girlfriends are for.
1. A headache that lasts for 17 months is a problem. See a doctor.
1. Anything we said 6 months ago is inadmissible in an argument. In fact, all comments become null and void after 7 days.
1. If you won’t dress like the Victoria’s Secret girls, don’t expect us to act like soap opera guys.
1. If you think you’re fat, you probably are. Don’t ask us.
1. If something we said can be interpreted two ways and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, we meant the other one.
1. You can either ask us to do something or tell us how you want it done, not both. If you already know best how to do it, just do it yourself.
1. Whenever possible, please say whatever you have to say during commercials.
1. Christopher Columbus did not need directions and neither do we.
1. All men see in only 16 colors, like Windows default settings. Peach, for example, is a fruit, not a color. Pumpkin is also a fruit. We have no idea what mauve is.
1. If it itches, it will be scratched. We do that.
1. If we ask what is wrong and you say “nothing,” we will act like nothing’s wrong. We know you are lying, but it is just not worth the hassle.
1. If you ask a question you don’t want an answer to, expect an answer you don’t want to hear.
1. When we have to go somewhere, absolutely anything you wear is fine … Really.
1. Don’t ask us what we’re thinking about unless you are prepared to discuss such topics as baseball, the shotgun formation, or golf.
1. You have enough clothes.
1. You have too many shoes.
1. I am in shape. Round is a shape!
Thank you for reading this. Yes, I know, I have to sleep on the couch tonight — but did you know men really don’t mind that? It’s like camping.
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Monday evening, I came home and inflated the Aerobed that my boss and his wife were kind enough to outright give me. The evening passed with relatively no incidents; I worked at my computer, watched some television, and went to bed a little before eleven. I woke up at 6:15 am, if memory serves. I don’t know as I slept wonderfully, but I did choose this time to sleep simply on the bare mattress in my underwear; I imagine adding sheets and a pillow would increase the comfort level as well. I may try deflating the mattress a bit more; I get the feeling that some of my problem may have been that it was too buoyant. I’m not sure.
The exterminator’s report had fallen behind the bookcases, so I found it about mid-evening. He found “light” infestation in the “living room”, “bedroom”, and “office” (which is all the same room), as well as in the hallway, but found a more medium-level infestation in the closet. He found no bedbugs in the bathroom or the kitchen. He says he found about 20 bedbugs altogether throughout the unit. According to this sheet, he used:
- either “1202″ or “120L” of CB Intruder (0.1% cyfluthrin, 0.05% pyrethrins, and 1.0% piperonyl butoxide);
- 30L of Delta Dust (0.05% deltamethrin), and
- half a gallon of Demand CS (0.03% lambda-cyhalothrin).
He is due to come back on September 6 for a second and hopefully final round of spraying.
After showering and getting ready for work, I went to go pick up Charlie. I dropped him off (he was meowing quite emphatically, perhaps due to the strange smells of insecticide still in the air, as well as due to the odd rearrangement of furniture in his world, I suppose).
At some point during the morning, I realized that my travel suitcase might have played host to some bedbugs, given the packing involved two weekends previous. In one of the front pockets, there were two specks that I was unable to pick up with my hand, and, when attempting to look for them again, they seemingly had disappeared. They struck me as a sign of potential nymphs, as I had seen this described by another blogger dealing with bedbugs. This opinion was further cemented when I found a live bedbug outside on one of the outside seams. I ended up throwing out the suitcase, to be entirely safe. So far, the significant financial losses associated with this process have been my half of the fee, the boxspring, the mattress, a computer keyboard, and now a travel suitcase.
I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised at having seen a bedbug alive, as this is the phase where, according to the exterminator, their homes inside the baseboards have become inhospitable, and they then come out, cross the barrier, and die. But it was still producing of some moments of heavy anxiety. I would like to know at what point they should all be dead, or, in other words, at what point I should be alarmed if I see any alive and about.
Conjunctive with that anxiety is that, having learned that the infestation in the closet was “medium” and not “light,” my mind now seems to have fixated on the thought that there were five bins moved from the closet. Two are Rubbermaid storage trays that snap very securely, and these give me no worry, but three others are very large storage bins. They do indeed fasten shut, but they don’t have that same Rubbermaid-style click — I wonder how tight they fasten (one lid lifted off with nearly no effort) and whether they are home to further bedbug infestation. I may want to explore them.
I am hoping that my sleep patterns adjust to sleeping on the Aerobed; it’s certainly comfortable enough that most people do it, and I have a feeling that the trick will be to simply to get it adjusted to the right comfort level. I’ve even heard that some people prefer Aerobeds over real mattresses. We shall see. And let us hope Charlie’s newly clipped claws do not puncture the mattress!
At this point, it’s my understanding that at least a few people are following these posts, and I get the sense from my blog’s oddly somewhat high Google ranking (why it is not just considered a puddle in the middle of nowhere, I simply do not understand) that people may run across these posts looking for how to deal with their bedbug problem. At some point when my energy level is higher, I may try to assemble things in even more of a ‘how-to’ kind of guide, at least from the perspective of how I approached it. But on the other hand, I’d like to make this easily forgettable once it has dissolved into my past - thus, I’ve not even created a ‘bedbug’ category in this blog. I’d much rather, once bedbugs are part of my life no more, forget entirely about them and let them fade deeply into my past and into repressed memory.
In the meantime, should you be someone who believes in the power of prayer or the power of good thoughts, I would appreciate it if you could send either in my direction, that I never have another bedbug bother my apartment or my life.
More, I suppose, at a later date.
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I suppose it is time to chronicle what I did over this weekend in order to prepare for the exterminator. It was, in short, a pretty heavy upheaval of my life.
My parents came in from out of town on Saturday morning. My mother went to the laundromat and began cleaning every single piece of fabric I own in the apartment; my father and I went to pick up a Shop-Vac from the corner hardware store, and then started packing away books and videoshelves. We then vacuumed the floor moldings of all of the apartment. My mom did the laundry in a laundromat up the street, being careful to empty the garbage bags directly into the washing machine.
There were a thousand small details I really cannot recall in the blur, exhaustion, and heat of the day. Emptying shelves. Taking Kleenex and letting them soak up dripping sweat from my forehead. Pulling furniture away from the wall, yet trying to keep walkways intact. Ripping apart a dresser that had been standing on its last legs for far too long, yet leaving me with nowhere for now to put clothes other than garbage bags.
Making sure cabinet doors were open prior to my departure from the apartment this morning, so as to suggest or imply that they should not be ignored. Trying to remember where I had last seen bedbugs and thinking that other areas might be ’safe zones’ to place various items. Wrestling a mattress shortly after 5:00 am this morning down four flights of stairs, with a zippered mattress protector on it on which I had written “Do Not Take: Bedbugs!” — only to, strangely enough, walk out the door later that morning to find the warning cover gone and the mattress still there. I had nothing to mark the mattress with, so had to leave it to chance that no one would decide to pick it up. A call to Waste Management indicates that they pick up from my building on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so hopefully no one will have the bright idea of taking it before they picked it up today.
And so today, the gentleman from Smithereen came to the apartment, and, God willing, the varying treatments today have annihilated 90% of the bedbugs in my apartment, according to what he said previously during one of my many question-and-answer sessions. He will come back on September 6 and kill the remaining 10% of nymphs and bedbugs that had either been in the walls, or had not yet been born, at the time of the initial spraying.
In a bug control forum on the Internet, I discovered a post stating that a Pest Control professor at the University of Massachusetts conducted a survey stating that 68% of all bedbug infestations require three or more treatments, 26% require two treatments, and 6% require just one.
I plan to take that with a grain of salt, as it is not anything published, as far as I can tell, and is repeated secondhand from a source credited, yes, but unnamed. Furthermore, it seems to me when thinking those results over that there must be a large number of unitemized factors that would affect the results of this survey. The size of the infestation, the size of the venue being treated, the extensiveness of that venue’s preparation for the treatment (thus enabling or inhibiting coverage of the poisons), disposal of the mattress/boxspring, and the reason behind the original infestation all would affect the number of visits possibly required to exterminate them all.
I cannot see how one could conduct such a survey without having the results include such data, or at least be normalized across the board with such data, i.e., limiting the survey to people who own the same type of residence and who prepare said residences identically for the exterminator. As for me, I have a light infestation; I have a studio apartment; I disposed of my boxspring and mattress; and I have gone to great lengths to let the exterminator gain access to the areas he needed in my apartment. All of these, I hope, will work in my favor.
The sole remaining factor that throws me hard, however, is that I simply do not know, nor can I ever confirm for certain, the origin of the infestation. If I cannot know what caused this infestation, I cannot take steps to avoid reinfestation.
In my last blog entry, I discussed where the three most popular sources of bedbug infestation evidently are: used furniture, intra-unit travel, and picking up infestation from elsewhere. Since I have not bought used furniture, the latter two remain, and they end up being a yes-or-no response to the question of whether they will return. If I picked up an infestation from elsewhere and brought it to the building, then they should hopefully not return, given the steps I’ve taken. If this was the case, I could have picked it up in many places in Chicago, and taking my CPAP test in a hotel which is both next to Chicago’s heavy tourism thoroughfare (Michigan Avenue) and home to foreign airline staff on layover is a prime possibility, given the epidemiology of bedbug infestations.
But if I did not bring it into the building, or if bedbugs traveled outside my apartment during the course of my own infestation (such as when the landlady’s husband brought the boxspring down unprotected), then reinfestation becomes likely. My landlady tells me that no one else has complained of bedbugs to her. I think this is a somewhat good sign. If someone’s infestation pre-existed mine, they would have had to have had it for a certain amount of time before it began spreading to my apartment. Thus, their infestation would have to be worse than mine, and I simply cannot see anyone going without complaint if they had been bit the number of times I have over the past couple of months. If my landlady has not yet heard about it, I would say there is a fair chance they are not elsewhere. Not an outstanding chance — this is all built on a chain of assumptions, after all — but a fair chance, nonetheless.
She says that she will be inspecting apartments in October. When I asked her if she would be looking for bedbugs, she said she will be looking for “everything.” I’m not certain whether or not she has the expertise or inclination to spot them. I would hope that if they were elsewhere in the building, she could spot them at such a time and have them treated.
I would say that one of the biggest problems I am having in dealing with this is that I find it very hard to adopt the attitude of “I will cross that bridge when I come to it.” The idea of planning for contingencies has been part of my soul for quite sometime, and although it occasionally has its benefits in terms of being prepared, in many other ways, it burdens my soul far too heavily. For example, the thought of having to do all this work again — and solo, as my parents have very understandably opted out of doing this a second time due to their age and the physical effort involved — is a thought that ratchets up my anxiety to unheard-of levels. Furthermore, the thought further occurs that this supposed next occurrence might not be the end of the line, conjuring up a worse Flying Dutchman of having to futilely stamp out infestation after infestation for the rest of my life, repeated incidents of huge physical effort being required, continued huge drainings of funds for exterminator fees, mattress/boxspring replacements, and so on. Admittedly unrealistic, yet it has a nightmarish quality about it that haunts me deeply. There are no predictive facts upon which one can draw to determine the possibility of a return, or to lessen same. One can only be notified to their existence by the bites and by the tracks they leave on bedding — in other words, you can learn the bad news, but not prevent the bad news from occurring.
I chastise myself when such hauntings occur. I ask myself how I would like to be in Iraq right now, fighting for my life, carrying heavy armor and materials in temperatures far above 120, such as is described vividly in this soldier’s incredibly well-written journal. I ask myself how I would like to be dealing with cancer, and being worried about whether that will come back. I ask myself how I would like to be handling this bedbug situation, except working a minimum-wage job and fighting off a much higher infestation level. There are hundreds, nay thousands, of ways that this situation could be far more difficult than it is.
Unfortunately, such chastisements of rationality don’t always work to calm irrational fears. I am simply trying to control the anxiety as it arises through means I choose now to keep private, and through such reminders as above.
If they come back? Well, in such a case, depending on if I had the money free, I would have to go through this once more. (What else would be my choice — let them breed?) I would have to save up $400 or so, and begin collecting boxes (most likely from the grocery store down the street). Once I had enough cash saved for the exterminator’s fee, and enough boxes saved to pack, I would do what was done this time: launder everything I owned and place them into bags, pack most of my various belongings into boxes, and have him spray twice. Depending on what I have purchased between then and now, I might then have to purchase yet another mattress and boxspring. But unless I then carried them with me after that infestation to a new place, I would hope that would end the line there.
(Mental notes: I should probably sit down at some point and figure out exactly how much this has cost me, and also I should probably note how many boxes I’ve needed in order to pack all of what I have, so that such figures are handy should I ever need to do this again. I suppose this is a good example of how such ‘contingency planning’ thought patterns do indeed help in some cases.)
I have realized, however — and my family seems to agree with me — that the time has come for me to vacate my current apartment building. The building is 83 years old, and the apartment is in far worse shape than it appears. The apartment is difficult to keep clean: the building’s age no doubt creates a lot of dust; the slackness of the windows allows in dirt from the outside air; and I could in fact keep a better cleaning schedule. It is discouraging, though, to clean things and then have full-fledged dustbunnies re-emerge no more than three or four days later. I also realized, as we prepared the apartment for spraying this weekend, that there are an immense amount of various places where dust can enter or accumulate within the apartment easily.
Although I dread the thought of packing up things and moving them yet another time, this time even more extensively, I most definitely am going to do so at the conclusion of my lease. And, I suspect I may find myself sounding out my landlady as to whether she would be willing to let me out of my lease prior to its conclusion, which is at the end of next May.
Whether or not she does, however, and whether or not bedbugs come back, I must — MUST — focus on other things in my life oriented towards improving my life. I wish to move, whether sooner or, at the latest, at the end of May. I can start focusing on where I want to move to. There are other things I wish to accomplish by next summer, such as significant weight loss. I can strive to accomplish this before next summer.
I have been exhausted over the past few days, but I hope with the cooler weather that I will find my energy greater and thus my emotional resiliency stronger. At this point, I would love my life to be what my life was prior to my discovery of bedbugs. It has been an additional burden at a time when my soul was ready for no more burdens. But that having been said, this incident may have a longer-term benefit to my life. It has caused me to have to undergo considerable and sudden change, and perhaps I had grown too settled.
Let’s say someone approached me right now and asked me to write a rosy yet at least somewhat realistic future for myself between now and next summer. It would be this: these two treatments entirely kill all bedbugs in my apartment. No others are in my apartment building and I never revisit a location that gives them to me. My landlady is kind enough to let me out of my lease at the end of October or November, and I then move to a newer apartment building that has been recently renovated, has a corporate management agency, and has a freight elevator. Between then and June 2006, due to my more comfortable environs and updated kitchen, I become considerably fitter and enter next summer a thinner man who can go home to air conditioning.
At the moment, if all of those things were to occur prior to next summer, I would be a very happy man and consider it a year full of good fortune and/or blessings.
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(Index of all my bedbug posts.)
I have been putting off writing about this for a while. But looking at a Technorati tag for the word, and also having Googled about, I’m sufficiently satisfied that enough people in the blogging world have been exposed to this that it’s not something I’ll be particularly held to task for as something I caused, or something I am liable for.
I’ll start with where I believe this may have originated, letting myself reveal it in its own way. On February 26, 2005, I went to a local hospital to conduct a sleep study, to diagnose the extent of my sleep apnea and determine on what setting a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine might be sent. However, I did not go to a local hospital, but to a hotel that is a block or two off of Michigan Avenue. The hotel could be considered slightly swank; definitely hospitable, in other words. Before I went up, I noticed that there was a very large collection of people speaking Swedish or German in the lobby. I inquired with the front desk out of curiousity, and found that the hotel was used as the place for a particular airline to house its pilots and flight attendants overnight while in town.
That is where I believe this story might have originated, but now, for the next installment, we jump forward to probably late April or mid-May. At that point, I begin seeing bites on my arms. They accumulate. I am aware of their unusual number, but say that I must simply be prone to mosquito bites, especially after, at one point, I see a mosquito land on my finger while typing at bed. This is how June, July, and the first part of August proceed.
On August 9, I go to a new physician, as I had begun a new job last April and had not seen a physician since, and some of my prescriptions were running out. I ask her to look at the bites, which I were pretty sure were healing, to make sure she felt they were healing. She looks at me and says:
“Oh, those aren’t mosquito bites. Those are bedbug bites.”
The hotel is where I believe I picked them up, as newspaper articles about the rise of bedbug infestations in America have indicated that their spread has been greatly facilitated by international tourism and by hotels. It seems the most likely culprit. Alternatives that I have been able to hypothesize are that they travelled from another apartment within my building; that the ill-kept Loyola ‘El’ stop gave them to me, thanks to the prevailance of untreated bird droppings (bedbugs are associated with birds, as well); or that in my travels about Chicago, I was somewhere that was severely infested, or sat where someone who lives in a severely-infested apartment had just sat. Considering I ride public transit, the latter is a possibility.
Much of August 9 is spent learning about bedbugs, Google-ing the hell out of them, and trying to determine my next course of action. I arrange to leave work early to meet up with my landlady and head up to my apartment, to see if we can determine what is affected and what is not.
We get up there. I pull off the sheets of my bed, and stand up my mattress in one area of the apartment, my boxspring in another. We look at the mattress first, and then our gaze falls upon the boxspring. In the area of the boxspring where the metal wheeled frame had curled around it, protecting it from the light, many bedbugs were crawling up and down that space. It was a half-remembered image that inspired horror within me which I’ll remember for quite some time.
After mentally stalling for a few moments, my landlord’s husband took charge, asking me if I wanted to keep the wraparound mattress pad. I said, ‘No,’ and he used to protect his hands as he brought the boxspring down to the trash. In retrospect, that action may or may not have allowed a few to drop off and go into other apartments. It would have been better if it had been somehow bagged first.
My landlady wanted to use her own pest control service to spray the apartment, but when I asked her what techniques they would use, it did not sound as if they knew what they were doing. I looked on the Internet, and arranged for someone from Smithereen Pest Control to come out for an estimate. Smithereen has been in business in Chicago since the late 1800s, and continues to do bedbug work in areas in Chicago overrun with bedbugs, sometimes even pro bono, such as in low-income ill-maintained housing areas. He advised me that they were focused more in the remaining mattress and in the baseboards of the apartment, near the videoshelves. (It turns out a baseboard is a name for the molding between a floor and a wall, not for the floorboards of the apartment, a point of initial confusion.)
He asked me to remove all books and videos off of the shelves, and empty any furniture that had joints or could not be all of one impregnable piece (for example, a metal file cabinet is safe, or a Tupperware tray that can click shut, but a wood computer desk, or my book- or videoshelves are not). Anything that has cracks, it will need to be emptied so that he can have access to its joints. I will be packing away those books, videotapes, and contents of various cabinets; if they house bedbugs themselves, those bedbugs will be poisoned when they cross the now-sprayed furniture seeking me.
I will then launder every fabric I own. Those things I cannot launder, I will need to dry clean. I was open with the dry cleaner about the bedbugs, and she agreed she would do it as a separate load; I will bring the coats in within garbage bags.
My parents are, thankfully, coming up to assist me with all this physical labor, which, since I am unfortunately still quite out of shape, would have been extremely difficult for me to do alone.
I’m told that this is what he would call a ‘light’ infection. A ‘medium’ infection would be 200-300 bedbugs, and he has even done severe infestations, where he has seen 2,000-3,000 bedbugs. He said that in those cases, they would go in in special suits and empty their vacuums half-way through.
I am renting up a Shop-Vac from a local hardware store to vacuum the baseboards as well. Sweeping, of course, would just raise the possibility of pushing them around the apartment.
He will spray something called ‘Demand CS’ on all of the baseboards, which will be a barrier which, when the bedbugs cross it to come eat, will die. He will also spray an aerosol called Intruder, which is a contact kill that kills anything it comes across. Finally, he will inject boric acid in the various cracks and crevices of the apartment. The Demand CS is microencapsulated, meaning it poses no danger to Charlie or I; the Demand and the boric acid both last 60 days from their first application, which should be enough to kill off the whole tribe.
I am kenneling Charlie at the vet for the day, however, just to be safe.
I will then leave all of the material in the apartment the way it is for about two weeks, and on Tuesday, September 6, he will come back to the apartment and spray everything once more. The first spraying should kill 90% of the population in my apartment. The second service will kill the remaining 5% that are deeply inside the walls. I may see some in-between the two sprayings, but I shouldn’t consider myself re-infested when I see them, because those that come out will die, due to the nature of the insecticides.
Bedbugs are in search of a blood meal, not food or dirt. Thus, although our society has associated them with filthy conditions, this is not true: they are in five-star hotels just as easily as they are in one-star hotels. The exterminator I spoke with said that weekly washing of one’s sheets can slow their progress, but certainly not stop their progress or kill them.
There is not really much of a preventative that you can do, aside from trying to be aware of your surroundings. There are three ways, he said, in which most people bring bedbugs into their home. First, they may purchase used furniture. (I have not.) Second, they may be in a place that is severely infested without realizing it. Finally, through intra-unit travel in an apartment building.
You can tell if you have bedbugs usually by looking for black tracks on the bedding, which are the bedbugs’ fecal stains. These show up best if you use white- or a light-colored sheet. They also usually hide in the seams and curves of a mattress. During this infestation, I have had the most success catching them when I wake up in the middle of the night using a flashlight to cast a quick beam up and down the mattress side.
Their bodies are shaped so that they can easily hide in most any crack and crevice. They can live for up to 18 months without feeding, although that starving pattern is oriented more out of necessity; I’m told they will come out to try to feed at the most once a week. They are attracted by the carbon dioxide you breathe out, as well as by your warmth. They prefer dark, but will come out in light if they feel opportunity is there; to my great surprise, I saw a bedbug earlier this morning crawl across my mouse. (Needless to say, it was captured and squished immediately.) Their peak attack period is prior to dawn, although, obviously, not exclusively then.
The bedbugs themselves are quite visible. I would say they are about the size of an apple seed. Their nymphs resemble periods and are not quite as visible, but may stand out against lighter-colored surfaces. When either is squished, they will result in a blood smear on whatever surface they were squished against (your mattress, your thumb), assuming that they have fed, which they usually have.
You most of the time do not actually feel the bite, because when they actually bite you, they have two tubes which they use in the feeding process. One sucks blood from you, but the other injects bedbug spit, which contains anticoagulants and anesthetics. What you actually feel when the welt or ‘bite’ sensation triggers is your skin’s reaction to the bite. You will often see these bites in a “linear group of three,” to quote an eMedicine article.
WHy are they around? As I said above, international tourism has assisted in their spread from place to place. Additionally, America has done two things in the arena of pest control which has assisted bedbugs in resurging. First, they outlawed DDT. DDT’s use in post-World War II periods pretty much eliminated the bedbug from modern life for Americans during that time. Second, pest control services prevailingly use gel-based bait, and not aerosols, when attacking insect infestations nowadays. Aerosols have the useful effect of often also killing bedbugs, but gel baits do not affect them.
The exterminator tells me that it is very unlikely that someone can bring along bedbugs from one place to another, unless you are in the middle of a severe infestation. Additionally, they may congregate in unclean bedding, but not so much in unclean laundry.
I may post about this more in the future; I imagine I will, as the purpose of posting this was to break the ice for myself, so that I could post about it publicly again. If you have bedbugs, what would I recommend you do?
My parents should pull into town in 45-60 minutes to start the grand moving/laundering/etc. project, and I’ve not showered yet, so I find the need to wrap this up quicker than expected.
I would throw away your mattress and boxspring. Unless your pillow has protective zippered covers, I would throw them away as well. I would notify your landlord, but I would make sure that the exterminator they hire knows to treat bedbugs differently than other insects. For example, fumigating the apartment will have absolutely, categorically no effect on a bedbug.
I would follow that exterminator’s instructions, and would not supercede same, but I would make sure that you make sure the treatment is as comprehensive as mine is being: make sure all various shelves are being sprayed, and so on.
I do also feel the need to say the following two things:
First, I am not an expert in this situation, and my comments above are solely my own experience and the experience of the professional with whom I spoke, paraphrased through my own memory and notes. I thoroughly declaim any responsibility for my advice above, or in future blog entries on this topic, being effectual, because I am not a professional in this situation and am just sharing my own personal opinions. In short, I don’t want anyone suing me because what I’ve been trying to do with this crisis hasn’t helped them as much or at all.
Second, this blog entry could possibly be read someday by someone who is looking at me in a romantic context, since I sometimes invite people I’ve met through Match to check out my website. If that’s the case, I’d point out that although this topic may give you the shudder — as it does me — hundreds and perhaps even thousands of people across America get these. It’s not a reflection on any inate quality of me, as they have nothing to do with filth or cleanliness. It is just a spin of the roulette wheel who gets it, with the probability being more likely when you live in a major metropolitan area like Chicago. The Illinois Department of Public Health, for example, tells me that there has been a real bedbug upswing on Chicago’s North Side. New York City has been dealing with them as well. Don’t reject anything you may have been previously considering just because of this moment in my life. It is not a reflection on me, and there is nearly a zero chance that I could in any way affect you.
That declamation may sound rather insecure. All I can say is that evolutionarily, this sort of stuff unnerves people. Bedbugs attack us at night and suck our blood; even though the cumulative effect is not horrible, aside from bites, as a species we’re oriented towards revulsion of insect infestations, just for health reasons.
I suppose the best way to end this entry would be to remind the reader that despite the revulsion involved, this is something that’s a roulette wheel, and can happen to most anyone, unfortunately. Deratogatory comments will be treated with a total and utter lack of my usual belief in First Amendment rights …
(Extensive linkage moved to a separate entry.)
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