I spent the Friday night one week after the discovery of bed bugs sweeping up the layer of diatomaceous earth I'd spread over the bedroom floor in preparation before the move back into my bedroom. Airbeds are nice in an emergency but my cats and I were feeling cramped living and sleeping in just one room (I am not someone who does well living in a studio-like setting. I need my bedroom and sleeping area to be separate or I start to feel claustrophobic). I was also sick of having to put on a special set of shoes I left outside the bedroom to put on upon entry and remove immediately after exiting so I wouldn't track DE all over the apartment.
I hadn't yet learned how bad for my lungs that amount of DE floating about could be but had been intuitive enough to cover my mouth and nose with a scarf (read the warning about diatomaceous earth dust here). It's a good thing, too because the dust was everywhere after the first sweep. The room was hazy, like riding behind a truck on a dry dirt road. When it became obvious that while I was sweeping up some of the dust I was mostly dispersing the dust to finely coat everything above floor level I decided maybe mopping would work better.
So I mopped my hardwood floor. An hour later when it was dry and covered with streaks of DE, I mopped again. An hour later, still streak-covered, I mopped again. 3 separate moppings seemed to do the trick.
I unbagged the bedding I'd washed on Wednesday and re-made my bed, looking forward to what I hoped would be my first real good nights sleep in a week. Thoroughly exhausted from a week's worth of fitful sleep and several hours of strenuous mopping and moving of furniture, I passed out on the plastic wrapped sofa I'd thrown blankets over to make it semi-comfortable for sleeping. I woke up around 4:00 am and went to climb into my bed thinking I was safe since I'd left the DE on the floor in the bedroom and dusted around the bed frame for more than 48 hours ... enough time to kill any bug that walked through the dust. I was hoping they all had.
I woke up several hours later to both of my cats sitting next to my pillow staring down ... not at me exactly, but on something close to me. My ankles and wrist felt itchy. Serge, the boy kitty, made his "there's a funny bug" noise. And I knew. I sat up and looked on the mattress between the pillow and my cats. Nothing. I lifted the top pillow and found my tormentor: a nymph, close to adulthood, crawling between the pillows. I squished it and blood squeezed out. I was its fresh blood meal, and it was on its way back to the harborage to molt and become an adult.
The full dusting of DE had been so messy and such a bitch to clean up, I decided to try a different method. In my research I'd read about "isolating" the bed. Isolating the bed involves finding a jar or pan or paper plate or something of the sort to place the legs of the bed into and then adding some substance to trap the bugs to prevent them crawling into the bed with you and/or to kill them if they make it through the substance. Some sites suggested water as the substance. They can't swim so if they crawl in, the drown. Some suggested talcum powder, which doesn't kill them but does trap them. Some sites suggested Vaseline. Many suggested Diatmaceuos Earth. Most of the sites also suggested double sided tape on the bed legs should the bugs make it through whatever mote you create for them.
Placing the legs of my wooden bed frame in water seemed like an excellent way to destroy the bed, so I 86ed that idea quickly. I didn't have any talc or Vaseline. I did have plenty of DE. I bought disposable aluminum cake pans, managed to maneuver my bed frame so that each leg was in a pan using the lift with all my strength and then kick the pan into place method. I'm strong, but it wasn't easy to do alone. This is another moment, like wrapping the couch, when an extra set of hands or feet would have been a seriously great boon. But I managed, like I usually do. When everything was in place, I sprinkled DE into the pans, thinking "try to get me now, f*ckers".
I needed a break from my apartment and a break from all the work. A friend invited a small group of us over to her place to catch up on Sons of Anarchy and I absolutely leaped at the prospect of exiting the place that should have been my haven, but wasn't, for a few hours. I warned my friend what was going on, in case she wanted me to stay away on the off chance I might transport a stow-away. She was suitably disgusted but nice enough to let me come over anyway.
That was the night the psychological effect of having bedbugs really started to hit home. My friends are affectionate and very touch-oriented. I couldn't stand being touched, especially if I was being touched lightly. My hair follicles activated and hair stood on end. I started searching for bugs. I noticed whenever I talked about the infestation I was unconsciously scratching. My friends noticed how irritable I was. Someone tried to tell me it wasn't that bad, saying they don't spread disease, thinking it would help me feel less dirty. Instead, I practically ripped her head off for diminishing my experience.
I explained what I'd spent the day doing to my bed, and one of my friends who had done a bit of bed bug research in the preceding week informed me that wouldn't help. He'd read that apparently when the bugs can't crawl up your bed frame to get at you, they will instead crawl up the wall, across the ceiling and DROP ON YOU. Little bloodsucking alien paratroopers who are attracted to the carbon dioxide you exhale and can sense your heat as you sleep. Sounds like the plot of a bad SciFi film, no? It was certainly starting to feel that way.
I had another cocktail and tried to put it out of my mind and just enjoy Sons of Anarchy. I was mostly successful. Our friend finally kicked us out close to 1:00 am and once home, I went straight to the Internet to verify the paratrooping abilities of the bed bug and learned it was indeed true. I spent the next three hours first on my hands and knees painting DE dust along the baseboards of my bedroom with a paint brush and then on a ladder doing the same to the crown molding, ensuring any bed bug paratroopers who made it to my bed would be on a Kamikaze suicide mission if they made it.
The work is labor intensive, the bites are itchy, but the real damage of the bugs, in my opinion, is the psychological toll the infestation takes on you. You don't sleep unless you manage to get so exhausted you pass out - how can you, knowing as soon as you close your eyes there are countless bugs waiting to come out and make you their blood meal? When you do sleep, it isn't restful. You become obsessive in your need to prevent them from biting you. You disrupt all the routines in your life. You feel like things are crawling on you all of the time. It alienates you from friends, family or co-workers who don't understand what you're going through. You feel isolated, alone, and dirty. They may not be vectors of disease, but they are certainly vectors of trauma.
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