Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite? Don’t Let ’em in Your Home in the First Place!
The chances you’ll experience an infestation may be low, but if you do, the hassle and stress are through the roof. Trust me.
Traveling is one of life’s treasures. Until you bring unwanted guests home in your suitcase. My wife and I are still getting over that happening to us on a summer vacation to Europe. I don’t think the trauma will ever fully leave our systems. It returns with every errant speck we see on our bedsheets.
As long as we were away, we could not have been happier or more relaxed. We hiked the wildflower-speckled Alpine trails of Zermatt beneath the snow-capped majesty of the Matterhorn in southern Switzerland’s Valais canton.
We visited dear friends in the Swiss city village of Basel, where we’d spent the last 16 years of my career. We went to some wonderful art exhibits in London and Paris, sipped delicious wine at sidewalk cafes, and had some wonderful dinners.
The holiday halo hung over us for days after we returned. But then, suddenly, catastrophe struck from the farthest reaches of nowhere. Before you accuse me of exaggerating, read on. But BE FOREWARNED. DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU!
Sometimes, the Universe Sends Signs
Maybe we should have taken it as a sign that, since returning to New York, accompanying practically every morning TV news show we watched was a comical commercial featuring a cute little beagle named Roscoe, the bed bug dog. “Hey, where’s Roscoe?” a succession of typical New Yorkers ask the pest-control man. “He’s workin’!” responds the man, standing in front of his van.
Then, quick cut to some unfortunate family’s apartment, where Roscoe dutifully sniffs out the source of their grief — the pesky little blood suckers known as “natural hitchhikers” that latch onto people’s luggage and other belongings.
But never fear, the even-tempered TV ad implies: a quick dose of freeze spray around the beds, sofas, closets, and floorboards is all it takes, and… poof! Hearth and home are bed bug-free!
If only it were that simple. Here’s what happened in real life.
A little while after our vacation, my wife and I both found ourselves scratching itches on our arms and legs. Then, one morning, I spied a suspicious-looking little bug on our mattress cover. About the size of a ladybug but dark-colored and much more sinister-looking, this creature matched the description of a bed bug I found on Google. So I went downstairs and informed our building’s superintendent.
They say you shouldn’t panic if you find bed bugs in your home. But everyone around us did, and so our blood pressure surged, too. It was as if I’d reported a dead body in my bathtub. Our super immediately reached into his back pocket for his walkie-talkie.
Speaking into it in his “Code Red!” voice, he summoned a work crew to come up to our apartment — STAT! — with an ultra-high-powered vacuum cleaner. They descended upon our apartment, lifted our mattress, and sucked up every scintilla of matter on every square centimeter beneath it, bed board, frame, and carpet.
“Loose Lips Sink Ships”
Before they were finished, I’d already received an email from the building’s management, alerting me to expect a call from their own pest-control company. It looked like I was actually going to meet Roscoe, or at least one of his canine cousins, in person. Then, the manager called me on the phone and urged me to keep quiet about the situation, lest I cause panic in the apartment complex. “Loose lips sink ships,” he told me.
The photos of the insects I sent the pest control company were all the confirmation needed. The “K9,” as they refer to their bed bug-sniffing beagles, would not be coming until AFTER the treatment to ensure the coast was clear.
Until then, the sum and total of everything I’d ever heard or thought about bed bugs was captured in that silly little bedtime phrase, “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite,” and in that benignly amusing Roscoe commercial. Boy, was I in for an education!
Nothing could have prepared my wife and me for the magnitude and duration of the ordeal that befell us, turning our lives upside down in an instant and literally forcing us out of our home and into a hotel. And once we started telling people?
The number of bed bug horror stories friends began to divulge was mind-boggling. It’s as if bed bugs were some terrible social taboo, like a psychological disorder or sexually transmitted disease that no one would ever talk about unless they found out you had it, too.
Are These Things Insects or Flesh-Eating Bacteria?
My eyes widened, and my stomach tightened as I read the instructions the pest-control company sent me on how to prepare for the treatment: All clothing to be laundered and dried at 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or else discarded; all books, CDs, shoes, and other day-to-day items (in essence, ALL your belongings) placed in clear plastic bags to be sealed with chemical pesticide strips inside — FOR TWO WEEKS!
That’s how long our bedroom had to be taped shut to keep in the chemical treatment and allow it to do its work. My wife and I spent the first few nights in a Hilton Garden Inn down the street, with our apartment door taped shut and posted with an official document that made it look like a crime scene. In a way, it was, and the perps were about to get the death penalty.
After we returned from the hotel, we spent the rest of our exile on the sofa bed in the living room, getting by with a few essential items in a sort of go-bag the pest-control people instructed us to pack for the duration.
When the K9 sniff-through was scheduled, my wife and I anticipated it as if it were some great moment of truth. It felt like a sort of twisted Groundhog Day when, if the beagle gave the all-clear, we could resume our normal lives, but if he didn’t, it was back to another two weeks of hell.
Granted, the Roscoe look-alike was a cute little fellow, no doubt. But I swear if he’d found more bugs, I’d have strangled him with his own tail. But he didn’t.
We breathed a huge sigh of relief and thought the nightmare was behind us. And yes, the very worst part was. But then, when the pest-control crew and their canine companion departed, my wife and I looked around our apartment and beheld a sea of plastic bags surrounding us as if we’d just woken up in a disaster area strewn with emergency relief packages air-dropped by FEMA.
It took us a full week to put all our things back in place, and it was every bit as hard as moving into a new place. As if that weren’t enough, it cost us a small fortune to have all our coats and sweaters laundered and carpets and curtains professionally steam-cleaned to make sure the remnants of the bugs were gone.
It felt like we’d resorted to the nuclear option — the most drastic and devastating attack possible — for some lousy little parasites. Was all that really necessary?
Let me summarize what I learned about bed bugs.
Bed bugs can go without feeding for 400 days and still survive. Bed bug eggs can remain dormant without a host for a whole year. A female produces between one and seven eggs a day for 10 days after a meal.
The exterminating company Terminx says, “A single pregnant female bed bug can cause an infestation of more than 5,000” of the little monsters within a six-month period.
Staying in hotels is far from the only source of bed bug infestations (although I’d bet we picked ours up at a hotel in Paris). They can hide in shoes and in clothes at vintage or discount stores, in storage units, in furniture and upholstery, on buses and trains, and in the seats of theaters; they can live in the woodwork of apartment buildings and beneath baseboards.
Once you go through the bed bug nightmare, you don’t want to experience it again. Ever. Researching the subject online, I came across an expert — Michael Potter, a former professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky — who told The New York Times that it’s “pretty darn unlikely” to encounter bed bugs in any given hotel room. But once you’ve felt their wrath, “pretty unlikely” is not unlikely enough.
Speaking for myself, I think I experienced an acute case of post bed bug traumatic stress disorder. Paul, the guy who cuts my hair, told me he thought he picked them up one time in a movie theater and vowed never to go back to the cinema again.
I personally intensely examined every piece of upholstery I sat on both inside and outside my home, especially when traveling, for quite a while afterward.
I suppose in the end, though, when it was maybe a year or more behind us, my wife and I both felt that we’d been together through one of those “Whatever-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger” experiences.
We’re back to normal now, traveling and feeling comfortable in theaters and public transportation. But the demon bugs are still there in the back of my mind, my eyes perpetually peeled for little dark specks that look like apple seeds.
Takeaways
Here’s what we learned from our experience:
Choose the hotels you stay at carefully, and make sure that you thoroughly check beneath the sheets for signs of pests as soon as you arrive.
Don’t leave your clothes on the floor of the hotels you stay at. Put your luggage on stands or in closets and keep them closed tight.
Use hard-cased luggage, and pack your clothing in re-sealable plastic bags.
For added protection, spray the insides and outsides of your luggage with 70% isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol) before and after your trip.
That may sound like a major hassle for something with a low likelihood of occurring. But believe me, the alternative is worse.
For anyone interested in finding out more about bed bug science — how long they’ve been around, where they came from, what causes them to make comebacks from time to time, and the history of trying to eradicate them — read this in Scientific American, about “How Scientists are Tackling the Bed Bug Nightmare.”
In the meantime, sleep tight, and — well, you know.
