We recently had a bedbug problem in our apartment. This is the story. It was a “minor” infestation, but for reasons that will become obvious, that word means very little.
This is more a story about social interactions and people who helped in a time of need, people who didn’t, and people who thought they were helping but in reality needed to shut the fuck up and stop trying to help, or people who needed to encourage more urgency.
I am going to do you all a favor in this article. I’m going to not post any images of actual insects. You’re welcome, in advance. Medium doesn’t have a [spoiler] tag, but I’m also going to keep my descriptions vague. The only image is of a piece of paperwork. One thing I will say, however, is that bedbugs can look like a LOT of different things, and they can be both larger, and tinier, than you expect.
I’m also going to tell you that bedbugs are resistant to most chemicals, and have evolved to the point where, unless you’re allergic to them, you’ll never know you’ve been bitten. I’m allergic. (If you’re allergic to dust mites, you’ll likely be allergic to them too).
For the last six months or so, I’ve been getting minor rashes, in odd places. The backs of my arms, and the small of my back. I was the kind of kid who was allergic to pretty much anything when I was younger, so phantom hives were not an unusual symptom for me, except that the way I’m eating lately, there’s pretty much no dietary variation. We only use Free and Clear laundry detergents, never use fabric softener, etc.
Once or twice, in the past six months, we’ve found a bug of some sort, and have asked friends about it, and been told things like “That sounds like a carpet beetle, they’re everywhere around here” or “Looks like a tick to me, get your cats a flea collar.” Ticks aren’t super common here in Northern Washington, but they’re not super unheard of, either.
I’ve mentioned it to building management, and they have said, effectively, the same thing. “Yeah, if it’s carpet beetles, we’ve seen them once or twice but they’re harmless.”
Most of the time, I relied on other people’s descriptions, people who I thought knew better, had lived in the area longer, worked from the theory that this had been going on for months with minor symptoms
Heck, I even saw a doctor via a telemedicine appointment (who prescribed me a single-dose steroid pill), and then an in-person appointment with an allergist who said “this doesn’t look like an allergy to me”.
Nobody, including the professionals, raised any alarms.
I should mention something critical here: I was the only sufferer of our three person household, and I was the only one sleeping/sitting on a couch in my office which *also* happened to be the couch-bed most of our guests have used.
Finally, after noticing a few too many (again, mistook them for ticks on a given day), I started looking very very closely at my couch cushions. And I found adults. And not-adults. And eggs. And took more pictures. And promptly freaked the fuck out. And called Orkin’s 24/7 number, and had something scheduled for the next day. And emailed my building management the photos and effectively said “Look, I’m an engineer, this is a solvable problem and I’ve already contacted the professionals, but I am keeping you informed.”
The Orkin man came out, and confirmed from my photos and spotted some more in the folds of our couch, that the problem was what we thought it was, and gave me both the prognosis, and the price: The best known solution is to hire a company to bring in a bunch of heaters to raise your domicile to 150 degrees, and it costs about $4K. “You should do it soon, if you confirm it now we can have someone in by next week.” No pressure.
A quick call to building management told me that “Yeah, that bill would be on your end, but our contractors also say the heat treatment is the way to go, and that number sounds about in-line with what we’d expect.”
A further call to my renter’s insurance that I’ve been paying for the past ten years told me they wouldn’t cover this at all.
So, I’d be doing this alone. My roommates (one of whom made under 5K last year; the other works retail and has minimal savings) would not be able to help much with this on the financial side. They are both doing what they can, but in a space where it would have been a 1700/person split, that didn’t happen.
I dumped a bunch of savings into my checking account, and paid down a credit card so, hey, at least I can get Amtrak points for this stupidity.
I work in IT with a heavy bent on security. If I have a system that is breached, the general answer is “reformat and start over.” Even if I had gone for the option of “Move out and buy new stuff”, I’d still be on the hook to solve this problem. So for this problem, I followed a similar mentality: I went with the most nuclear option, at a premium price, from the company you’ve heard of, because, well, to quote an old IT adage: “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.
With a diagnosis, and a prognosis in hand, and knowledge of that the price would be, I googled the problem more. At this point, I had already seen the things up close and personal, so seeing pictures on the internet would no longer break me.
And at this point, I really hit the stride of the signal-to-noise issue. There are people on the internet who will tell you “throw out all your furniture”. There are people who will tell you “don’t throw out any of your furniture”. There are people who will swear their product works, and they sell it at stores everywhere. There are people who say “Try diatomaceous earth”, there are people who say “Try essential oils”. There are people who suggest bleach. It’s like searching for COVID cures in April 2020. I’m shocked I haven’t seen someone say Ivermectin.
And as part of Orkin’s solution, they bring in a special bedbug sniffing dog. And the internet is of mixed opinions on this too: “Training a dog to sniff bedbugs is only slightly easier than training them to sniff Cancer”. However, this was a) included and b) the solution that building management said was best. But I remained skeptical.
Stop helping, internet.
Discussing this with people felt like telling them you had tested positive for Gonhorrea. I felt unclean, disgusting, like my house was a dirty place where nobody ever should be. Like it was a contaminated place.
I told my boss at work that i was going to be effectively useless for the following week or two. Taking time off work would not be an option for my roommates. Work took the correct answer: “Take all the time you need, let us know what we can do to help.” Graciously, thank you for this, if you’re reading it. You are my dream job in so many ways.
Other friends of mine, when I discussed it, had a bunch of unsolicited advice: “Your building management should cover that, unless they can prove it’s your fault.” No. Stop helping. Arguing this back and forth with management, and failing to act will just keep us exposed longer, and ultimately, could lead to us being thrown out. The best answer here really is “solve the problem first, worry about money second.” Yes, that attitude comes from a place of some financial privilege.
The checklist of things you need to do for a heat treatment is long, and scary. And involves things like “pull up all your carpet at the edges. Which, being a renter, is not something I can do, and is not something building management offered to do, either. Per Orkin, verbally “Just do what you can.” Per Orkin’s paperwork, “The service will not be provided until the rooms are completely prepared as set out herein.”
As an engineer, that disconnect is…stressful. I want to do what the directions say. I want to have the best chance of success. But we literally don’t have enough room in the rooms to turn our sofas upside down. We don’t have the time to pull our TV’s off the walls and take down all our shelving.
Note that this is not a guaranteed service, either. They guarantee it for 30 days. If you see a bug in 30 days, they’ll re-treat. No money back, no rework 6 months down the line. Just another money grab, another hotel stay, another send-your-cats-to-be-boarded-for-three-days. For a house I don’t even own.
It’s largely disrepectful to people who’s had cancer to say this, but it’s not dissimilar: Any diagnosis of this is bad: minor cancer is still cancer, and past a certain point, you just need to take the expensive, not-at-all guaranteed path forward, and even then, it might just come back. You don’t get “cured” from having cancer, you just go into remission.
And much like cancer, the best insurance does very little for you. There is no insurance you can buy that will cover the cost; no regular preventive service plan you can sign up for. We are starting to see coverage options for people who rent on AirBNB, who cannot control what people bring in and out, but for a hotel, this is just part of doing business: recycle the mattress, fumigate or heat-treat the room, just like you’d do if Van Halen trashed it because they found Brown M&Ms. So you can protect your investment property, but not your home. For a homeowner, if you have this problem twice a year, you’re paying twice a year. Or buying the equipment to do your own heat treatments.
My roommates are also a bit packratty. They’re young, and a bit disorganized, and one of them classes themself as a “mountain goat”. They run a home-based craft business. There are piles of their stuff that needed to be moved, and it didn’t fully happen. Laundry doesn’t always get put away in a timely manner. At one point, trying to get our bed away from the wall, I came across a bunch of chocolate covered somethings. Just, in the carpet.
It was one of several times I attempted to, or thought strongly about, dissolving our cohabitation. It was not what I needed right then and there. It made me feel alone with the problem. And it’s something I’m still working to address.
Bedbugs are not generally interested in pets. However, as part of the process, you have to board your cats, and have them looked over by a vet, and it has to be on the day of the heat treatment. Our current vet just said “Yeah, we don’t know what to tell you.”
They’re no longer our current vet.
We called our local emergency vet (who we assume is used to doing things with the time frame being “Now”), and they suggested someone who could help, but it would turn out that that group only got back to me via a voicemail the following day. We called the place we had adopted one of our cats (unable to help), called several other places (not accepting new patients, etc). As usual in a pandemic, nobody can answer a fucking phone.
The cats are not my cats, but I was the one who footed the bill to board them, buy another carrier for them, update their vaccinations, and the like.
Orkin gave us a mattress cover and told us “don’t remove it for over a year.” Aye-aye. We put an additional mattress cover on over it to block liquids. I will admit, I sleep better knowing it’s there. We bought all new pillows, plus all new pillow encasements. They don’t make such an encasement for couches.
We put ourselves up at a slightly nice hotel nearby for a few days. Binged Cobra Kai and The Queen’s Gambit and ordered room service. The heat treatment happened, and as part of that, a bunch of our clothing was ransacked (deliberately, so it would get exposed to the heat). A lot of 3d printed stuff at home was damaged and malformed by it. We had to do a bunch of laundry, and that took longer than it needed to, and still isn’t fully done. We still need to take the actual step of discarding things that no longer fit. The place is still a mess.
The bedbug sniffing dog (an adorable shepherd mix named Buddy, if it matters) came in and didn’t find anything, but it all just feels gimmicky to me.
I searched for Landlord/Tenant lawyers and filled out a bunch of contact forms saying “I recently had bedbugs, my reading of the law is that it might be my landlord’s responsibility, I’d like to know what my options are for recovering some of my expenses.” I’d be happy to hear from three lawyers who say “you’re out the money, deal with it.” Know what I got, instead? Radio silence. Zero calls back, zero emails back, etc.
There’s lasting damage, and it’s inside me. I’m not trying to self-diagnose, but there’s a term for what’s going on in my brain: PTSD.
I am forever going to be paranoid about this. And I don’t mean paranoid in a “Bill Gates 5G tracking vaccine” way, but paranoid in a “This actually happened, and cost me real time and money.” way. Paranoid in a “Every little time I have an itch while going to sleep.” Paranoid in a “I travel for work and will never not think about this when traveling, and may not come home from a trip without visiting the laundromat first ever again” sort of way. Paranoid in a “I don’t trust bus seats” kind of way. Like, I may literally be the kind of person who leaves my clothes to bake in a heat chamber (or freeze in a chest freezer) in my garage post-travel. And you know there are companies that sell those things.
I still don’t know what the root cause was: was it something a friend brought in? Something that came down in the walls from my upstairs neighbors? Something I picked up at the venue where I sometimes go for overnight parties? Something I picked up while traveling down to the bay area? (“Any hotel, even nice ones, can have them”. Thanks, Internet, stop helping.) I will continue to encourage my visiting friends to be as paranoid as I am.
Even despite taking the cushions to the laundromat and washing them all on hot, then dousing it with 99 percent isopropyl, I still can’t bring myself to sit on the tainted couch. Maybe never will. Might have to pay someone to haul it away, and have to buy another of the exact same one (it was $700 new at Ikea). Our main, living room couch is synthetic leather which has the benefit of not being biteable-through (and not having cat hair stick to it, which is the real reason we have it).
I’ve gone and spoken with my GP about getting a script for something to take the edge off and make me able to back away from the ledge of “you girls need to move out next week”, because it doesn’t help anything. Thusfar, they’ve given me an antihistamine (Hydroxyzine) that makes me sleep like the dead. I’m not sure that’s precisely what I need, but it’s something. I would have had no way to contact them before the fact. In a post pandemic world, you just CAN’T reach a doctor when you need one, and this isn’t the kind of thing you’d do telemedicine for.
A friend has asked if I’ve considered speaking to a therapist. Yes, I’ve considered it. I can’t even find one that takes our insurance for my bipolar partner, which is a dance we’ve recently tried to do. Because once again, in a pandemic, nobody can answer a fucking email or give you a call back.
Even so, what’s the therapy for this? Realizing that when I say “I keep seeing bugs” and people tell me not to worry, that I need to be more paranoid about what I’m seeing? Like when I had a liver abscess and the ER told me “You have a hernia, go home?” Do I need to be That Customer who demands to speak to your manager?
Is the therapy realizing that I can’t count on people to do what I expect of them? That I need to continue to carry most of the load? Is the therapy coming down harder on my roommates for having too much stuff and not keeping the place clutter-free? Is the therapy a way in accepting that it’s okay to be Howard Hughes level paranoid about this stuff?
I hope there’s a solution. Because this problem is eating me alive at night. Hopefully only figuratively.
