An Apology, and The Great Saga Against Evil

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

Hello everyone!  So... it's been longer than a week since I posted.  It's actually been two weeks.  Well, I'm sorry about that.  That is my first apology.  My second apology is that I am not going to write about London this week:  I'm going to write about something else entirely.

I don't know if you remember my battles against scabies that I've been mentioning in past posts.  I've had this ailment since about, well, five weeks ago now, I think.

However, I discovered that things were not as they had seemed.

I warn you, this is a very complete account, so don't feel like you need to read the whole thing.  I'm writing it somewhat to simply to preserve my memory of the situation.

And now, my friends, I shall tell you a story.

I will leave out the tale of the battle against scabies, which lasted about two weeks and involved two applications of scabies cream, followed by intensive washing of all of my clothes and bedding, and avoiding touching anything that I had touched before the treatment.  Well, one night, the night before the superbowl, while talking to my mom over skype about the scabies, and how things weren't working and they kept coming back, Mom asked me what my bites looked like.  Was I sure it was scabies, she asked?  Yes, I was sure.  The spots looked just like they did last time I had them, complete with showing up below my eyebrows, just below my eyelids.  Mom asked me to look at pictures of the spots online, and tell her if they looked the same.

So I looked up scabies spots online.  And they looked... different.  Not like what I had.  But it seemed so similar to scabies.  The spots were showing up at my extremities, where it is coldest, because the scabies don't like high heat.  They had the same burning, itching feeling. What else could it be?

Well, at this point, I think Mom looked up general pictures of spots, or was reading about what general possibilities there are for what itchy skin spots could be.  Then she asked me a very fateful question.

Could it be bed bugs?

Now, for those of you who thought bed bugs were just made up from that "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite" little rhyme, you are mistaken.  I had thought the same thing, until I listened to an episode of "This American Life" over the summer, about a woman and her family who had been trying to battle bed bugs in their house for a long time.  This meant I knew something about bed bugs.  Bed bugs live off of human blood, biting you during the night as you sleep.  Their bites leave itchy spotsAnd they are extremely hard to get rid of.  They are big enough to be visible, but they can hide everywhere, anywhere there is a little nook or crevice.

But I didn't immediately think I had bed bugs.  I had scabies, just like last time.

But then I looked at the online pictures.  They looked exactly like my bites.  My bites weren't nearly as numerous as those you'll find online, but man, they sure looked similar.  Mom and I then started looking up other signs of having bed bugs.  Spots on your sheets, from bed bug feces and from bed bugs that get squished when you roll on top of them?  Yup, I had those spots.   A good number of them.  I had had spots on my sheets almost since the day I got them.  And the bites only came in places where I had skin exposed as I slept:  My arms, especially my hands, my feet and ankles, my face, my neck, sometimes my lower back.  I even realized that I had found a bug on my mattress.  When I had been flipping it over during one of my scabies cleaning sprees, I saw a little, tiny brown bug crawling along the edge of my mattress.  I had been grossed out, and I had tried to squish it in a tissue.  It was too flat:  I couldn't squish it.  So I had washed it down the sink, but I hadn't thought any more of it.

This was not a good realization.  I was really freaked out.  After hanging up with Mom,  I called Kyle, in tears, and had a freak out moment.  Kyle was very understanding.

Since the superbowl was that evening, the O'Connell House was having a superbowl watch/sleep over.  The game started about 11:30 Ireland time, and ended around 3:00.  I hadn't been planning to go, but of course now I didn't want to sleep in my bed.  So, I jumped on the bus (with a bunch of other loud, drunk American students looking for a pub in town) and made my way to the O'Connell house.  I spent the evening skyping with Kyle and talking with friends, and slept on the floor in a corner.

The next day, I went in to the housing office and told them about my problem.  They were very understanding and said they would send someone out to inspect later that day.  Not three hours later, someone appeared:  a nice Irish man, knocking on my door, carrying a tank of spray, a hand-held spray can, and a bucket of white powder.  I took all the linens off my bed and watched him as he hosed down my mattress, my bed stand, my carpet, my wall, my suitcases, and then, took down my headboard from the wall, and sprayed behind that.  That's where he found a colony.

I say a colony, but I don't think there were very many there.  I didn't get that close, but I could see a clustering of their droppings on the wood.  That day, I washed my sheets and everything else that had been on my bed, putting it through both the washer and dryer, which is supposed to kill all life stages with its heat.  On the way to the laundry, I passed a guy named Mike who's also studying abroad here from Notre Dame.  He inquired about what I was doing, and I told him, saying that I had bed bugs.  He said that he had a bed bug proof mattress cover, if I wanted to use it.  Those words coming out of his mouth made me so happy!  I couldn't believe it.  I had done research on getting mattress covers, and discovered that they were not only hard to find, but expensive.  Apparently his mom had made him bring it, even though he didn't have bed bugs.  I told him his mom was very smart and gratefully took him up on his offer.  He said I could pick up the cover that evening.

That evening, I went to his apartment, and he pulled out the cover from where it was crumpled in a pile under his bed.  It was just a plastic cover that zipped completely around the mattress so bed bugs couldn't crawl into the little nooks around the seams and at the corners.  I brought it up to my room.

As I was looking over the cover, you know, because at this point I'm a bit paranoid about everything, I saw a little brown dot.  Just a little thing, but... I looked closer.  And, lo and behold, it was a little tiny brown bug.

Was it a bed bug?  It sure looked like one.  It was very small, so it was hard to tell.  I had a plastic baggie handy that was filled with a soapy film: I had used it to transport my face soap when coming over from the states.  I used the sticky bag to catch the little guy, and then I kept looking at the cover.  There was another spot, this one beige.  It also turned out to be a bug.  It looked somewhat like the pictures of bed bug nymphs (immature bed bugs) online.  I took the cover out of my room and kept looking at it in the hall.

After finding six bugs, two brown ones and four white ones, I decided I had enough evidence.  Feeling very forlorn and not looking forward to what I was about to do, I went back down to Mike's appartment, carrying my plastic baggie and the mattress cover.  I found him and his other Notre Dame roommates in their living room.  I told them, feeling absolutely awful, what I had found.  They all made faces of disgust.  I held out the baggie as evidence, but they didn't really want to see it.  Mike took the cover, stuck it in a trash bag, and threw it away immediately.  Then, I helped him look at his bed to see if it had any stains on the sheets.  There was one tiny spot, but it didn't look like the spots on my bed, and he hadn't gotten any bites.  I left him, apologizing profusely, hoping the bugs I found weren't actually bed bugs, but not feeling particularly hopeful.

That evening I went to bed, telling myself that hopefully, even though I had no mattress cover, the bed bugs would be gone.  Even if they weren't, people before modern pesticides lived their entire lives with bed bugs.  I'm sure many people still do.  So I decided I wasn't that much of a sissy in need of my developed-nation-middle-class-culture, and I could deal with it if other people could.  I did start wearing long pants, long-sleeved shirts, and socks to bed.

The next morning, it was hard to tell if I had any new bites.  The old bites last a while.  I wrote a note to my roommates and stuck it to our kitchen door.  One of the roommates had had bed bugs when she had stayed in a hotel in London, and she was somewhat concerned about them being in our apartment.  She decided to go to the housing office and ask if someone could spray all the other rooms, just in case.  By the next day, I was pretty sure that the exterminator hadn't gotten all the bugs in my room the first time, since it seemed that I was getting new bites.  Not many, just a few.  Not that I was surprised: from my research online and the This American Life episode that I'd heard, I knew not to be too optimistic.

This is what I have discovered in my research:

Bed bugs are small, brown, and flat.  They have a life cycle that consists of egg, nymph (which is white and smaller than the adults), various stages between nymph and adult, and adult.  The eggs can take up to 17 days to hatch.  Bed bugs can survive without a blood meal for up to a year and a half.  That's a looooong time!  So, basically, you can't starve them to death.  You have to kill them all outright.  However, the nymphs need a blood meal fairly quickly after they hatch if they are to survive.

Here's some pictures.  The hand isn't my hand, I just found the picture online.  I don't know why anyone would let the little things crawl on their skin long enough to take a picture of them, but everyone's different, I guess.  The picture gives a good idea of scale, although apparently adults can grow up to a quarter inch long.

Eeeeew!

There are a variety of ways to kill bed bugs.  A professional exterminator can spray them silly with pesticides.  The white powder that my exterminator uses is supposed to scratch their exoskeleton/skin and kill them that way.  Heat, for example, the dryer or the oven, will also kill them.  They can also be drowned or frozen, although there's debate as to whether or not the freezer will kill eggs.

The exterminator came back on Wednesday.  He was very friendly, and he sprayed all of our beds, including spraying mine again.  So I did laundry again, and this time I took duct tape and taped around the edges of the shelves that house my clothes next to my bed.  I also encased my pillow in a trash bag and sealed it closed with duct tape.  I went to bed again, hoping the buggers were gone for good.

The days went on.  I lasted over the weekend, but by the time Monday came along, it became apparent that the bed bugs weren't gone after all.  I was still getting bites.  Again, no particular surprise:  the exterminator hadn't really sprayed the room thoroughly, and there were just too many places for the bugs to be hiding.  My methods of wearing socks to bed were helping.  Bites were limited to my hands, face, and neck.  I decided it was probably time to get the exterminator to come back.  I went to bed Monday night, visions of people in the Middle Ages sleeping on bed bug-infested straw mattresses floating through my head.

Well, Tuesday morning came. I was getting ready for the day, and I glance over at my bed... and there is a bed bug, plump with blood, crawling across my sheets.

I grabbed my plastic baggie full of soap, which I had saved in some grotesque fascination of the captives I had caught off of Mike's mattress cover.  My new captive dwarfed the old ones.  It was about the size of the bug in the picture above, and I could actually see the outline of whatever organ it used to hold my blood in its fat, flat body.  Feeling scared and disgusted, I decided to look over the rest of my bed.  I lifted up my pillow... and there was one hanging out right below it.

I caught that one in the baggie too.  At least it didn't appear to be full of blood.  I then found another one, this one on top of my duvet at the foot of my bed, and it looked like a large nymph, definitely gorged full of blood.   Freaking out just a little, I tried to catch it in the baggie, but in the process I let the one I'd found under my pillow escape.  I gave up on the baggie.  The blood-stuffed nymph I squished easily in a tissue:  it was under pressure.  The flat one from under my pillow was too hard to squish, so I washed him down the drain.  I should have flushed him down the toilet, because I spent the next few days with my drain plugged when I wasn't using the sink.

Later that day, I was sitting at my desk, working on my computer.  I was planning on going to the housing office on my way to class in the afternoon.  As I was sitting there, I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye.  Something crawling on my arm.

I didn't scream.  I just made a sort of groaning, "this is really gross" exclamation and rushed to the bathroom, where I knocked the bed bug into the sink, then let the water run and closed the drain on top of it.

When I went to the front desk, the normal lady wasn't there.  Instead, there was someone else.  I told them about my situation, and about how I was now finding the bugs themselves out in the open in the middle of the day.  Unfortunately, the lady didn't know what to do.  She was only a substitute to answer the phones:  the lady who was normally at the desk had broken her arm.  She had me fill out a form, but she didn't know what else to do.  I went to the O'Connell house, feeling a bit desperate, and told Joe, our emergency contact person over here, about the situation.  He ended up calling the housing office himself and talking to the lady.  She said she would talk to the building manager.

That night, I had another freak out moment with Kyle over skype.  Poor Kyle got the brunt of my feelings throughout this situation, but of course he was very supportive and helpful, and I appreciated it a lot.  My friend Julianne let me sleep on the floor in her room, in a sleeping bag donated by my friend John.  I took a shower right before bed and wore Julianne's clothes, so as to avoid any possible contamination.  I slept wonderfully.

Wednesday morning I went back to my room to get ready for the day.  As I was getting ready, there was a knock on my door.  It was Allison, who lives next to me, and in her hand was a tissue.

"Is this a bed bug?" she asked.  She opened the tissue, and the little guy started crawling frantically.  She dropped the tissue.  And yes, it was a bed bug.  I picked up the tissue and flushed it down the toilet.  She had found the bug on her shower curtain.

Without their meal from me, I suppose they had started looking elsewhere.

I went back down to the office after my classes to try to see how things were going.  The lady said she still had to talk to the building manager, and would call me if there were more developments.  I really wanted the exterminator to come the next day, on Thursday.  I didn't think I could wait any longer.  I knew the bugs were breeding and spreading.  Things were serious.

I determined to buy new sheets and throw out my old ones, just to be safe this time.  Luckily, later that day, as I was shopping, the lady at the housing office called and said that an exterminator would be coming tomorrow.  I rejoiced!  He was coming!

Later, I advised Allison on how to prepare her room against bed bugs.  She pulled her bed away from the wall and coated the wheels of the bed with thick, thick layers of vaseline, which they can't crawl through.  That night, I did not sleep at all.  I spent my time shoving every article of clothing, any cloth item, and any other item (back pack, purse, wallet, shoes, shower curtain) that could possibly go through the laundry into plastic trash bags.  I quarantined cloth items that couldn't go through the wash (fancy scarves, fancy skirt, fancy shirt) in plastic zip-locks and put them in the freezer.  I duck-taped plastic bags over my chair, and I put it out in the hall with my duvet, pillow, and sheets to be thrown away.  I cleaned my bathroom carefully and taped around items such as the shower knob that weren't flush against the wall.  inspected every item in my entire room with care, using a blow dryer to try to drive any bugs out of things with holes, such as my computer, my leatherman, my camera battery charger, etc.  Then I put those items in plastic zip-locks and stuck them in my now-clean bathroom.

While I was cleaning everything, I found more bugs.  One on my sheets, one trying to crawl into my bathroom, one on the ceiling above my suitcases, and one on the floor near my bed.  When I found these, I took a blob of vaseline on my finger, stuck them in the vaseline (which was gross, because their little feet would stick up in the air and wave creepily in panic), stick them in a tissue, and flush them down the toilet.

By the time the exterminator came around 9:15, my room was completely empty.  I actually found him outside as I took out my trash, waiting for the lady at the front desk to come in to give him a key.  It was the same guy as before.  I told him about finding all the bugs in my room, and he said he would "just blitz it."  So I let him in, and he sprayed down my room like nobody's business.  He also sprayed Allison's bed floor, and bathroom, and went ahead and sprayed my other roommates' beds too, just in case.  After he left, I took a short nap on a couch in our living room and did 7 washing loads and 10 drying loads of laundry (cost: 34 euro).

That brings us to now.  I have kept all of my clothes and other cloth items in the living room, and probably will until Tuesday, when the exterminator comes again to spray, just in case.  Everything else is still in my bathroom, and I've been sleeping in my friend's room while she's visiting Prague.  I've gotten a new chair, a new mattress, and even a new bed.  After the exterminator's second visit, I'm going to re-seal all of the edges of the shelves and such around my room.  I'm hopeful this is it, but still, I'm not that optimistic.  We'll just have to wait and see.

So, that's the story.  It is full of drama and hardship, but in the end, I'm sure good will come of it.  I will be posting again in the future with updates about the situation, and hopefully it will be good news.