Hello. I'm reeling right now because our city's bed bug problem has just hit close to home right in time to screw over our holiday plans.
We've got kind of a "perfect storm" of ways to get bed bugs that all happened back to back - we just moved to this house on November 15 (from an apartment that has no record of bed bugs and where we never saw or heard so much of a sniff of them) using a local moving company, that *of course*, wraps your furniture in that lovely filthy quilted padding.
And then on December 2, we went away to Florida for a week. I know enough to check the beds, nightstand, drawers etc. in the hotel. We saw nothing and none of the 4 people in the room got any bites. I left my suitcase on the table and chairs, as we didn't have a luggage rack.
Suitcases and carry ons unfortunately came right in the house with us when we got back, as we do not have a garage, and it hasn't been cold enough outside to kill anything anyway. My wife and I both got sick the minute we got home and spent days in bed almost constantly before we could go back to work - in all the mess and kerfuffle of new house plus travel cleanup plus sick, luggage got thrown on the bed, etc.
Since we got back I've been a paranoia monster - I have anxiety/OCD issues and bugs of any kind are a big trigger, but my wife tells me I've been obsessed moreso than normal, worrying about bugs. 6th sense? I've been checking around the bed and the sheets on an almost daily basis and was finally starting to relax a bit as nothing was turning up,...
Last night I went to move our old couch out of the way for delivery of our new couch this afternoon (gotta love the timing...) and found a single kind've live bedbug and what looks like a fecal stain in the back piping of the couch. We killed it, it was full of blood - looks like not an adult for what it's worth? When I say "kind've" alive - I thought it was dead, and carried it from where I found it over to the table on my finger, without any sign of life - when we dropped it on some white paper to examine, it sort've feebly waved a leg around and scooted a bit. Lethargic is an understatement - do they get like that after feeding, or was this a hitchhiker already feeling somebody else's poison?
https://goo.gl/photos/7mMHTv8AHeKdV36B7
https://goo.gl/photos/pxtyUytdG9ULhRCf6
We tore the couch and our easy chair apart - literally, including slashing it open and looking at the inside (since we were getting rid of them anyway) and saw NOTHING. No feces, no cast skins, no bugs. We put both pieces of furniture outside til garbage day to be safe.
We also checked our bags and backpacks, nothing.
And there is nothing, not one hint of a bug, anywhere around the bed.
...did we get absurdly lucky? We're waiting on an inspector with 2 dogs coming today, and we're going to call a PCO afterward regardless to treat as if we have them, but I feel like unless we just brought one in from the bus, if they've been here since our trip, we've given them ample time to feed, and they don't seem to feeding.
What I don't understand is why, if there was only one, it was on the couch of all places? It had obviously fed recently, and I was on the couch for about an hour earlier that night, but you'd think they'd head to the bed rather than a couch we don't use for sleeping.
We've got all the odds and ends around our headboard have been sealed in bags, along with our coats and backpacks, until the PCO can give us some advice.
Help! Are we doing what we need to do? Should we panic and prepare for the worst?
(It doesn't help that we are in Canada, so we seem to have no access to Nuvan strips/vikane/packtites that aren't $1000)