Bedbugs: One More Gift from 2020

Okay okay okay. I know what you’re thinking. “You have bedbugs?! Gross!!!” Had, my friends. Had. Past tense. But oh my gosh, three most stressful days of 2020, and we’ve all lived through 2020, so . . . that should give you an idea of what it was like.

Here’s how this went down. Over the last couple of weeks, I noticed a few itchy spots show up on my torso. Most of them were just tiny little dots that didn’t swell up at all or even look very red; only one or two looked remotely like real bites. I might have googled bedbug bites at some points just in case, but the pictures online—huge pink dots, telltale patterns of lines or zigzags or bites—didn’t match, so I figured maybe it had been a spider or an allergic reaction, no big deal.

Now, I have a Marco Polo group of friends, and at the same time as these itchy spots were showing up, one of those friends was worried that she had bedbugs, so the others were talking about the signs of them. One sign that was mentioned was brown smears on the edge of the mattress.

As I said, I wasn’t really thinking I had bedbugs, but the morning after listening to people talking about the signs, I woke up thinking that I should at least check so that I could cross that off the list of possibilities. So it was 6:30 a.m., I was on my knees after saying my morning prayer, and I folded back my sheet to find this along the edge of my mattress:

WHAT. THE. They were little red-brown crumbles—crumbs, almost. I was thinking, okay, this doesn’t look like smears, but it’s definitely something that’s not supposed to be there. It was 6:30, so I didn’t know who I could ask that early—I got a wild thought of posting a picture on social media and then immediately discarded it because who wants to broadcast that they might have bedbugs on social media? :D After stressing about it for some time, I texted my mom to see if my grandpa would know the signs of bedbugs (he worked in pest control). She almost immediately texted me back and said yes he would, but so would she . . . why did I ask? Confused because I’d never heard her mention bedbugs before, I showed her the picture I’d taken of the crumbles.

She asked to FaceTime. I showed her the crumbles and she had me check between the mattress and box spring, where we found more. She confirmed that yep, that looked like bedbug shell casings. Apparently they shed their shells as they grow . . . yeah, gross.

At that point I was officially in a state of panic because I’d never had bedbugs, never expected to have bedbugs (apparently they’re on the rise though—I learned this through frantic googling), and I wanted them gone NOW. My mom commiserated—apparently, she and my stepdad had had bedbugs in their mission in France a few years ago, and it had been bad—like, really bad. For various reasons, they hadn’t been able to get professional help and had had to deal with it themselves. She advised hiring a professional to get rid of them and I was all on board. After calling a few different companies for quotes, I learned you can go with a chemical treatment or a heat treatment. Chemical is less expensive, but you have to have multiple treatments (at least so I read) because it doesn’t kill the eggs. Heat is more expensive, but it kills the bugs at all stages of the life cycle, so it’s got a better first treatment success rate. The place I went with also had a 90-day reservice fee if you saw a live bug after the treatment, and they would do a chemical spray after the heat treatment for some extra protection.

Welcome to two days of extreme stress. I felt disgusting. I didn’t want to sleep in my bed, so after the bedbug treatment guys okaying it, I slept in a sleeping bag in my living room (not the greatest sleep ever—woke up every hour probably from sheer stress). I felt icky and gross and didn’t want to be in my room or sit on my couch (it goes without saying that I wasn’t sitting on my bed). Per the bedbug guys’ instructions, I moved everything that could get hurt in the heat treatment—candles, aerosol cans, lipstick, etc.—to the garage. I took everything off the walls so there was no chance of it falling during the treatment. I put every item of clothing and bedding possible through a hot dryer for 40 minutes and then bagged it and put it in the garage, and I hung up all the clothes that couldn’t go through a hot dryer so that they’d be treated when the house was. My roommates did the same thing; it’s a wonder our dryer didn’t go out because we had it running pretty much 24 hours a day to get through all of our clothes and bedding.

Getting my room prepped for the heat treatment

The morning of the heat treatment was maybe the worst for nerves. Per instructions, prior to leaving the house for the treatment, we were supposed to put on clothes straight out of the dryer and not sit on any of our furniture to give no bug a chance to tag along with us out of the house and then get brought back in afterwards. I. Was. Paranoid. I was going to my boyfriend’s house nearby, so I didn’t even wear shoes, just in case, since I hadn’t put my shoes through the dryer. Luckily, the Utah weather was still decent, because after waiting until the last possible moment to shower and put on my freshly dryered clothes, I stood barefoot on the porch and waited for about 20 minutes for the bedbugs guys to show up.

They came in clothes and gloves, looking shocked at my lack of shoes and suggesting that we go outside to do the final paperwork. I told them I was so nervous about accidentally bringing a bedbug out with me that I wanted to throw up. They assured me that I’d be fine as long as I didn’t sit on anything, so I reluctantly went inside and stood in the middle of my tiled kitchen floor to do the paperwork. Then I escaped to my boyfriend’s house to work (on his computer so mine could be cleansed with the heat treatment—just in case). A few hours later, I went out to check on the progress, and this is what I found:

Very interesting. So the heat is piped in and circulated via massive fans, one for the upstairs (that’s my window it’s going in, so a good blast of heat was right where the problem was, which I appreciated), and one for the main floor/downstairs. I came back out to check a few times, occasionally bumping into the bedbug guys as they did their thing. They were very knowledgeable and felt confident that the problem was small, was confined to my room, and had been caught early. Just to make sure, though, they checked the neighbor’s place and even came and looked at my boyfriend’s in case I’d brought any bugs there before I’d realized I had them. (They didn’t find anything.) They also talked to both of us about the statistical likelihood of getting them again—low—which made us feel a lot better because, believe me, if you google “ways you can get bedbugs,” the internet will have you believe that it’s basically impossible not to get them by going . . . anywhere. Anyway, the bedbug guys ratcheted up the heat until it was 150 degrees in my house, which is well past the temperature needed to kill both the live bugs and the eggs, and let the house just cook.

After about 7 hours, the bedbug guys packed up their stuff and left. They instructed me to go in after an hour to open the doors and windows so the place could start cooling down, which I did. I then sat on my porch for the next two hours because it seemed unwise to leave my front door open and unattended—maybe that’s why the bedbug contract included a clause that said they weren’t responsible for the theft of any of your items so to take your valuables with you when you left for the day (gulp)(nothing was missing though). I am dang lucky this all went down before the freezing temperatures of this week set in because I would have been in trouble.

When my house was finally “cool” enough (approximately 85 degrees) to go in and start cleaning, I got a good look at how the bedbug guys had prepped my house further for the treatment (I've got footage of it in the video at the bottom of the post). They’d teepeed the beds and the couch cushions to let heat roast them through, moved a lot of stuff around to give it good exposure to the heat, etc. My job for the next six and a half hours was to vacuum/wipe down/inspect every item in my room. My poor vacuum. I spent over an hour alone meticulously vacuuming every centimeter of the top side of my mattress, which was the only place I found any evidence that the bugs had ever been there. There were little itty bits of their shell casings, like I’d seen before, caught in the seams of the mattress. The amount was pretty minimal overall, but it was still just gross to think I’d been sleeping on that, even divided by a few layers. Haha even now, a week later, I feel sick remembering it!

It was an intense process to everything cleaned and put back together, but now everything is back to normal. The bedbug guys said since the heat killed everything, so I didn’t need to worry about checking my mattress every day (I have anyway)—just once a week when I wash my sheets. Nothing to report so far!

I wanted to blog about this—gross as it is—because it seems like having bedbugs comes with a decent amount of stigma. People are grossed out, and you can’t blame them, but it’s hard to feel like they’re not grossed out at you, even if that’s not the case. When I found the first evidence at 6:30 in the morning, I didn’t know who to call, and I was worried about people judging me. So I wrote this blog so that if you have problems with bedbugs and need support, reach out! I won’t judge! You’re great and if you’ve also suffered from bedbugs, it’s okay—you will make it through.

Oh, last thing is—do I know how I got the bedbugs in the first place? No. I did get a secondhand office chair a couple of weeks before I found the shell casings and around when I started to notice bites, and that could have been it. Secondhand furniture is one of the ways the internet informed me that you can get them, and the chair was pretty dirty, stored out in a warehouse/garage. Bedbugs can live without eating for some time, so it’s possible they were in that chair and tagged a ride home in it, but I can’t prove it. The bedbug guys didn’t find anything unusual with the chair. It still weirds me out a little to use it, but it was in the heat treatment and the bedbugs guys sprayed it extra with the chemical treatment, so if that was the culprit, it’s about as safe as it can be.

Here's a video I made the day of the heat treatment, taking a little break from vacuuming to reflect on the whole experience.