The new social disease

You carry it without knowing. After staying out all night. Even in the best hotels.You can never tell who's afflicted. Sometimes they don’t even know, until the embarrassing hives and itching appear.Herpes? The clap? No (well, maybe, but not here). It’s bedbugs.

Yes, bedbugs, the scourge of tenements and, well, the 18th century, are back. Bedbugs (or bed bugs) are small nocturnal insects of the family Cimicidae that live by hematophagy, feeding on the blood of humans and other warm-blooded hosts. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Resurgent due to increased global travel and the banning of DDT, they’re showing up all over the place, and they’re remarkably insidious. From a health standpoint, they’re pretty much harmless, except for the aforementioned itching and hives. Oh, and their uncanny ability to drive their host into a spiral of madness.

I had the unfortunate privilege of bringing these tiny hitchhikers home from an August trip to Ireland, a country which, as you know, has had reasonable sanitary standards for quite some time. Roaming the countryside of County Kerry, I assumed I was running the risk of picking up some sort of sheep scourge from all of the scat I stepped in, but I never expected bugs.I stayed in five different hotels, all of which seemed nice and clean. There was no reason to believe that they harbored any insects that wanted to come home with me.Then again, one of my college roommates said the same thing about one of her Friday night hookups, and that one required a visit to the health center after a few days. (Itching and rash, oddly enough.)

Anyway, all seemed fine through September. I attributed a few small itchy spots to a stray mosquito that might have made its way through a window screen somehow. Then came the onslaught.By the time I found them in October, I had a nice rash of bites on my back, arms and legs. I discovered a bunch of sated bedbugs on the underside of my spare bed pillow, deceased after happily engorging themselves on my blood. Yeech.

If you're unlucky and took months to determine the cause of your misery, the little fu- I mean suckers -- will have totally infested all of your bedroom furniture and perhaps the cracks and crevices of the walls and floorboards and... well, you get the picture. I had a relatively minor case, which I determined had come in from the luggage I'd brought to Ireland and stored underneath my bed.

As you can read in the Wikipedia entry, the next step involves basically boiling all of your bed clothes, all of the clothes in the furniture anywhere close to your bed, and then vacuuming the living daylights out of your bedroom. Then you get the pest control guy in. I say "pest control" instead of "exterminator" because he or she can't do it all. Even when they reach every living bedbug during a visit, it's not over. You end up becoming a partner in the eradication, vacuuming and boiling clothes and changing your sheets almost obsessively. While the poisons or enzymes or whatever the professional used are good, they still won't kill the eggs, so you have to wait for them to hatch and then murder the nymphs. I guarantee you'll be seeing your new best friend, the pest control guy, at least once again. Fortunately they include a second and third visit in their fees. They know.

Oh, and they'll encase your newly treated mattress and boxspring in vinyl covers so the bugs that are in the bedding can't get out. You've got to leave the covers on for a minimum of a year until the bugs all die off (yes, they can live that long without another meal). I chose to look at the positive side: if I ever start wetting the bed, at least I won't wreck the mattress.

Unluckily for me, all of this happened during a very hectic and stressful time at work, when I was working longer hours and coming home totally exhausted. I was in no state to change the sheets, boil the crap out of them and vacuum like June Cleaver on speed. I had no time to have the bug control guys come back for the second visit, so when the bugs reappeared, I did the best I could with the enzyme solution the pest guys left me. I smoothed cortisone cream over the hives to control the itching.

And meanwhile, I was going absolutely mental at work with the stress of my job and the anguish of these little fuckers literally sucking my lifeblood out of me when I didn't have the strength to do anything about it. Not fun. I bought a few six packs of Guinness, not just to appease the Irish bedbug gods, but to get absolutely plastered to forget them for a while.

You really start wondering why they chose you, of anyone, to come home with. What, were they expecting to sleep with me and get their little green cards? This country is so set on keeping terrorists out of the country that they're harassing perfectly innocent people, when they could be sending these #*$&@^ to Guantanamo instead.

But I digress.Back to the social disease aspect. If you're dealing with a bedbug issue, you have to be careful who you tell, because you're apt to be classified as a moron or as someone in deep denial. Or maybe a hypochondriac. Very few people know about them and that having them is not an indication of poor hygiene or sleeping around in fleabag motels. Many people will tell you that you should have the pest control guys show up day after day after day and bomb the place. They'll tell you to throw out the mattress and boxspring and maybe the whole bed. When you tell them that those options won't help (and often mean that you'll pay good money for a new bed that will eventually get infested, too), they'll look at you like you're delusional. Everyone's an entomologist.

I couldn't do much at work but suffer the anger of my boss for all of the fuck-ups I was committing on some major projects. No way was I going to go chapter and verse into my angst-inducing infestation. Maybe I should have, but I figured it wasn't worth looking both incompetent and delusional.

The social life suffers, too. Forget about inviting overnight visitors over. Imagine the conversation:

"Uh, before you come over with your toothbrush and a change of clothes, there's something I have to tell you."

"Oh, boy. Do you have herpes? Hey, it's okay, I'll wear a condom or three."

"Uh, no, I have bedbugs."

"Good God!" *noise of screeching tires as the guy can't get away from you quickly enough*

Let's face it, no condom is big enough to cover the whole body. Well, unless the guy is really, really small, in which case he has enough problems to deal with.

So, bottom line, you've gotta be careful. The world is divided into two types of people: those who've had bedbugs, and those who will. The only solace is to remember that they were pretty much ubiquitous before the invention of DDT. Our ancestors survived them just fine. Except they were really, really itchy.