Bed Bugs. Eeeewwwww!

Loose Park Rose Garden

It was a normal day, just over two weeks ago, when I was visiting a friend in his apartment.

"Do you know what those bugs are?", he asked, pointing to a couple of small beetles crawling across the floor. Nope, I didn't. He has a penchant for bringing home fallen sticks to decorate his place; I thought he had brought the bugs in with one of his finds. Not thinking anything of it, I accepted a small box of food from him and left.

Dismissing the bugs was my first mistake.

Two days later, I got a call from the apartment management company. Those bugs were bed bugs. Normally sleeping off their nightly feed during the day, they were visible in daylight hours only because their numbers were so great that they couldn't all get their snacking done at night.

The manager was calling to ask me if I'd stop by his place to help him move the furniture away from the walls so his place could be treated. Right now, I am the only person who visits him. There is no one else to call when he needs help, and he has an old brain injury that makes him unable to work through the solutions to problems like this one on his own.

And I had brought a box home, and left it in my kitchen overnight.  Eeewwww!

Still, I hadn't seen any bugs, so I decided to keep a watchful eye out. I had a houseful of people at the time; I figured that I'd know soon enough if I had additional, uninvited, guests, because someone would get bitten. No bites over the next few nights.  *whew*

Back to the call: I gritted my teeth, said yes, and made my way back to the apartment a few days later. We moved all the furniture away from the walls, threw away the cardboard boxes and plastic bags he'd been collecting. We brought every piece of fabric in the place to the laundromat for the dry, wash, dry cycle that effectively kills the bugs, and placed them in trash bags in the kitchen as instructed. After I got home from helping him, I stripped outside, went straight to the shower, and put my clothes directly into the washer. We continued to keep our eyes open for bites, still none. So far, so good.

This was a week ago Thursday, the bug people were supposed to be there this past Monday. I went back over Wednesday to check on him. The minute I set foot in his apartment, I knew something was wrong. He hadn't slept, the furniture hadn't been touched. The treatment hadn't happened; a mixup between the pest control company and the apartment management team. They'd been able to work things out, and the treatment had been rescheduled for the same afternoon. Since I wasn't going to stay in his place a moment longer than necessary, we went across the way to a local park to talk.

To my horror, as we sat on a bench, properly socially distanced, I saw one bug, then another, crawl out of his clothes. In the fog of his exhaustion, he'd lost the energy to fight them. He'd become a walking, talking bedbug infestation.

As I inched away, moving to sit on the sidewalk, I asked him how he could stand the itching? Why hadn't he said something sooner? He looked at me blankly - it had taken him a long time to even realize they were biting. On him, the bites don't itch. He's part of the +/- 20% subset of the population who don't react to the bites. Until the people around him started to raise a stink, he didn't realize there was a problem.

EEEWWWWW!!!

I went home still shaking just a bit. I stripped out of my clothes outside the door. But, but. somehow, I missed one. At least one. I was sitting in the kitchen about thirty minutes later, and saw a bug crawling across the countertop. With dread, I squished it. An amazing amount of human blood for such a small creature poured out; a close examination confirmed my fears. I'd brought the pestilence home with me.

I was in his apartment less than five minutes. I'd touched nothing, sat on nothing. All I could figure was that it had dropped from the ceiling into my hair. 

I was in the shower within two minutes. (the pests drown easily.)

After my shower, as I sat contemplating my options, the apartment management team called again. There were so many bugs in his sofa and ottoman they needed to be destroyed. Would I come back to shrink wrap the items and move them out of the building? (Due to understandable liability issues, the building people are not allowed to go into an infested unit.) Wishing with all my heart to give another answer, I told her yes, I'd be back the next day.

Rita, my daughter-in-law, was listening to this conversation. When I hung up, she asked me if I'd like some help. I couldn't believe my ears. She's been listening to the story unfold, she knew how bad it would be over there. Yet there she was, offering to walk into bug hell with me. I have no words adequate to describe the beauty of character she showed in that moment.

After an uneasy night's sleep, our dreams/nightmares full of crawling bugs, the two of us went back yesterday. We were ready. There was a vacant apartment in the building; they opened it up for us to use the shower once we were done. We had plastic ziploc bags to put our clothing in once we were done, soap, towels, a change of clean clothing and shoes.

Reality wasn't as bad as the scenario in my dreams. The chemical treatment hadn't killed all the bugs, but it had put a significant dent in their number. With Rita to help, it was much easier to maneuver and plastic wrap the furniture, get it onto the dolly, and out to the dumpster. With two of us working in tandem, we were able to minimize the amount we had to actually touch the furniture with anything but our gloved hands. Reluctant start to showered finish, we were done in an hour.

We were both exhausted the rest of the day; are still fighting fatigue today. It took a LOT of emotional energy to walk into that apartment.

The heat wave worked in our favor yesterday afternoon. We put our bagged clothing into a trash bag in the hot sun, and left it there for hours. According to the meat thermometer I put inside, my car, parked in the hot sun with its black roof and black interior, it hit the magic 120 degree mark within the hour (they can survive less than ten minutes at temps over 118). When I retrieved the bags of clothing and examined them late in the evening, I saw a couple of bugs in the bags, but they were quite dead. I gave them all a bath in the laundry tub in the basement before bringing them upstairs to the washer, just to make sure, but they didn't try to swim, so they really were dead.

I called the pest control company who'd done the treatment to see what recommendations they could give to keep my house from getting infested. They sent me to a website to order some pheromone traps that'll tell me within a few days if I do have them wandering about my house. (Per the FexEx website, the traps will be here Monday.) If/when the pests do turn up in the traps, rest assured I will not sit around and let them multiply in peace. Professional treatment is pricey, and a pain in the butt to prep for, but I can dig up the money to pay for it. Peace of mind is worth a lot, and that's one of the reasons God made emergency funds. (For his apartment, the management company is scheduling a follow-up heat treatment - that should knock out any critters who survive the pesticide.)

I'm still trying to calm my nerves. I hate doing hard things. But if not us, who else would have done it? My friend is not capable of doing it on his own. There was no one else he could call. 

While bed bugs aren't mentioned specifically in any of the holy books I've perused, the stories therein do have a lot to say about helping out the poor, the afflicted. If this doesn't fall into that category, I don't know what does.

For the last few days, I've spent a lot of time mentally calling myself the stupid Samaritan, but I'm finally getting past that. Yes, I have to deal with the knowledge I probably brought some bugs home. Yes, the easy thing to do would have been to turn my head, walk away, and let it be someone else's problem. But in this case the easy thing would not be the right thing. Stupid or not, I would not be the kind of person I want to be if I ignored his plight.

Bed bug infestations be damned, I did good. Once some time has passed, and I get over the ick factor, I'll be glad for it. When I'm old and in my rocking chair and telling people this story, I'll be able to raise my head high and know that for this one moment in time, I was the hero.  

It'll be a good feeling.