Listen, I'm sure you're all nice and lovely people, but I never, ever wanted to be posting here in my life.
Unlike most people, I'm not coming here for reassurance that I don't have bed bugs or for bug IDs. I know I've got bugs and I know the bugs I've got are the bed variety. I know some of you are into this sort of thing, so here's my dudes: http://imgur.com/r1gJQJY [These were caught over the course of three days.]
My story is probably like many others, though there are a few aspects that I'm thankful for. Around the 5th or 6th of September (I just started a job, so I remember the dates very clearly) my left leg erupted with enormous red welts and hives. Five of these turned into bubbled blisters, which has only ever happened with fleas. The bite patterns looked vastly different than fleas, however, but to be safe, I flea-treated my cat. I used to live in NYC and now live in LA, so even though I treated for fleas, I still did a bed bug check. I react violently to bug bites and after having been bitten by a variety of things in my life (ticks, fleas, mosquitos, chiggers, etc.) I knew in my gut that this wasn't going to be mosquitos or fleas. I don't know what gave me this sense of foreboding, but somehow, I just knew.
For the next two nights, the bites got worse and increased in number. My boyfriend showed very tiny little bites on his ankles, but they did not itch and didn't seem to be anywhere else. I inspected my cat and didn't see any flea fecal matter or dead bodies like I have in the past when they've gotten particularly out of hand (mostly in the summer). I hate to admit this, but I definitely had an emotional breakdown in my living room after waking up to a bite over my eye that had swollen my eyebrow. Whoever said that this is more of an emotional toil than a physical one, you are 100% right. This shit is a silent shame and you just feel dirty, plagued, and uncomfortable, constantly aware of your oozing bites. There's nowhere to rest, nowhere to escape. They'll follow you. They're waiting in your safest, coziest place.
At this point, I started doing detective work. Had I been on any trips? Had I noticed bites in the past? Had I noticed anything strange that would indicate bed bugs? I live in an apartment building and the first thing that came to me was that, only a week before my bites showed up, the tenant in the apartment across from mine had pulled out and demolished her hideaway bed and left it in the hallway for three days. I had to step over it to get down the stairwell and finally a junk company picked it up. I also noticed more things down on the street in front of my apartment: plastic bags of things, bins, a wooden cabinet. I then remembered that during the time the couch was out in the hallway, I encountered the tenant in the laundry room washing at least six plastic bags full of stuff. I thought I was overreacting, but for some reason, I couldn't shake the feeling that my neighbor had bedbugs. My boyfriend brought up the fact that last month, a professional steamer and a shopvac were rented at that apartment and one weekend, I could hear constant cleaning.
I immediately became convinced that my neighbor, who lives in a two bedroom apartment with 4 people, a dog, and a bird, who is the queen of clutter, has bed bugs that made their way across into my unit when they were discarding their couch. The rage I felt at this moment caused me to run to Google and find this site. I immediately started following the directions of places to look. My bed was clean. I don't have a baseboard or a box spring, just a mattress on wooden slats. It's zipped in a cloth bag (it's memory foam) and the bag is all white. No spots, no shells, no fecal matter, nothing. It made no sense that the number of bites I had could come from a bed this clean. Also, since I'm super-reactive, I noticed I'd flair up with welts while sitting in my living room.
At this point I was wearing tights and long-sleeved hoodies to bed with bug spray on and a Citronella candle burning. I had ice packs shoved in my sleeves and pant legs to help the itching. I took regular Epsom salt baths, flip-flopped Claritan with Benadryl, alternated between hydrocortisone cream and calamine lotion. For a couple of days I didn't get bites and I started to wonder if I imagined it.
That brings us to yesterday. I'm sitting at my computer in the living room. I see my cat pouncing at something in the doorway of the hallway. I get up and look and there's a little black speck scuttling across the carpet. I immediately grab scotch tape and tape it to a sheet of paper. I had looked at enough pictures on this site to know what I had before I even finished taping it down. It was a bed bug and it was dark red, fat, full of my blood. Since I saw it in my hallway (at the entrance to my living room) I thought maybe they followed me in from the bedroom. I lifted up the mattress. Still nothing. Still clean. Right before I drop the mattress back down, I see a tiny speck move on one of the wooden slats. I press it with tape and it busts, leaving a red smear. I screamed. Was this how it ended? Was this how I said goodbye to this world?
Okay, maybe not that dramatic, but I did get teary-eyed, I'm not going to lie. I immediately called my landlord, I immediately disclosed that I suspected my neighbor's unit was the origin and at the very least it should be tested. To my surprise, my landlord was completely sympathetic to my situation. He's always loved my boyfriend and I and always calls us model tenants. I had no idea, but my neighbor across the hall is the COMPLETE OPPOSITE. Apparently she has been constantly causing trouble and he was completely in support of checking out her apartment. She had disclosed nothing to him and so he was pretty mad that she's potentially infested multiple units. He said that he would send an exterminator from Terminix over the next to confirm the bugs, make a plan for treatment, and tell us how to prep.
After getting off the phone, I went back to hunting for additional bugs. Since I'd seen one on my mattress and one in my hallway, I started to wonder where the source of the infestation was. I wasn't surprised to see one scuttling out of my hallway. It leads to my front door, which was the only thing that separated my unit from the nasty couch that sat in the hallway for days and days. The first spot I checked after getting off the phone was my living room couch. It's kinda old and upholstered with thick seams, so it seemed like a perfect place. Since I was already convinced I was getting bitten in the living room, I wondered if this was the source. I checked along the top seams, the arms, and in the cushions. Nothing. When I knelt down and checked the lining under the sofa, however, I saw one tiny bug in the corner of the seam. I saw another on the other side, but after checking all of the seams, those were the only I located. As much as it pained me, I left them, since I wanted the exterminator to see everything as is and I didn't want to cause them to disperse. I moved the couch to the center of the room and put four dishes under the legs and put soapy water and tea tree oil inside. I figured if they're in there, they're staying there or they'll come out and drowned. I did the same thing to the bed. As hard as it was, I slept in the bed last night.
When I woke up this morning, just before the exterminator visit, I noticed a single bed bug scuttling across my mattress. I taped it to the card with the other two. I searched my mattress and slats again. Nothing. Not even dust. I don't keep anything under my bed and my bed isn't up against the wall, so it is very easy to search. I don't have a nightstand or any furniture near the bed, so there aren't many places that they could go (unless they're in a crack I can't detect.) It's because of this that I feel like the main "headquarters" of these buttheads is my living room couch. I believe that since this is where my boyfriend and I spend most of our time (our living room is a half-office that we at times work from home in), when they came in from the outside, they settled there. I feel like at night, they seek me out in bed, but I do not think (at this time) they've made any sort of homebase there. Yet.
After the exterminator visit, he confirmed bugs. He told me to wash our clothes, bedding, towels and linens in hot water and dry on hot. Clothes that can't be washed should be dried for at least a half hour. He said to remove any clutter or stacked things, bag up anything that we find bugs on, and do not remove anything from the apartment. He recommended vacuuming, but I'm scared of getting my vacuum infested. Any tips there? The exterminator is going to call us with the day he's coming to treat this week.
Already on Amazon, I've ordered a mattress bag for when the place is treated, a steam cleaner rated for bed bugs, and several Climbup interceptors. Anything key that I'm missing?
What other questions should I ask the landlord? I feel like I have to absolutely insist that other units are checked and treated. Our apartment building has carpeted hallways/stairwells, so it would be exceedingly easy for these guys to hitchhike.
What other things should I do to prepare for this, maybe that he didn't tell me? He seems to believe we caught this early, but I feel like that's too good to be true. As reactive as I am to the bites, it feels like they've only been in this apartment for, at most, 2 weeks, but again, I know it's impossible to say with certainty.
I'm also just looking for positive vibes, encouragement, and all of that good stuff to save me from fearing the absolute worst, which is that life as I know it will never be free of bugs again.