“One night I slept in the car,” says Frank, chuckling. “I stayed up until late, and I got a pillow and a sheet that I’d sort of cleaned. And I snuck out at 3:30, because I thought if my neighbours saw me, they’d think I was crazy. And I got maybe two and a half hours in the car. But I was so happy in the car! Because I thought: I’m safe.”
Frank is a physician and a homeowner in Toronto’s well-heeled Forest Hill neighbourhood. About a month ago, he discovered bites on his skin, along with what he believed to be bedbugs on his daughter’s mattress. Since then, he’s spent over two thousand dollars on pest control bills, and has thrown out the contents of his garage and basement.
The trauma of getting bedbugs is something you can’t quite understand until you’ve been there. It’s an experience that teaches its victims just how much they rely on their homes for a sense of security. “It’s like your house becomes your enemy,” says Frank.
At present, after ten days of being bedbug-free, he explains, “Now I come home, and I’m not scared of my house. I don’t have to take off all my clothes, wash them, dry them. I’m leaving the sheets on the bed.
“I got rid of my bed, by the way. I threw it out.”
For Michelle, it’s a similar story. Michelle is a social worker who rents an apartment with her boyfriend. In July, she started noticing bites on her skin. After months of hyper-vigilance and “feeling like a leper,” Michelle reports that they haven’t seen signs since early September.
“It kind of felt like you were in the middle of moving. So, if you can imagine that you’ve packed all your things — but you still have to live there for two months. […] I feel like for two months, we didn’t have any break from it. It was exhausting. There was this feeling that the house is in chaos: we’re living in chaos, we’re living in limbo.”
That kind of chaos has felt pretty close to home these days. Quite literally, in my case.
For the past three weeks, my mother has been living out of her basement. The space down there is strewn with sealed Ziploc bags of clothes and shoes, while spray bottles stand guard at every doorway. The eerie smell of antiseptic haunts the house where I grew up. My mother, too, has bedbugs.
The Internet is abound with stories of horrific bedbug encounters: bites, extermination woes, and even attempted suicide. For anyone who’s just trying to get a few tips on getting rid of bedbugs, the online landscape is astonishingly macabre.
Bloggers detail their fumigation efforts and failures, while commenters flock to every post, offering words of support to their fallen companions. There’s a whole online community of victims out there, waiting for the next one to turn up. Just reading this stuff makes me feel itchy. Already, this is not looking promising.
“What happens is that once you start to go online, the people who are online are so distressed that you get a pessimistic view of eradication,” says Frank. “People are saying, ‘I’ve had six treatments, and I still have bedbugs. I’m going crazy. What do I do?’ And people would say, ‘Hang in there, bit by bit, day by day.’”
Perhaps it’s the bleak picture depicted online that has created such a stigma around having bedbugs. The futility of repeated eradication attempts, paired with a close-knit support network, make bedbugs seem more like a chronic disease than a household pest.
“It’s like you have cancer,” says Frank.
“If you read any advice, you [know you] have to put all your clothing in bags and wash them,” Frank continues. “You have to get rid of anything where bedbugs might be. And you start becoming suspicious of anything. And so, I spent three or four days packing everything up. I got rid of all the contents of my garage, all the contents of my basement. I threw out fabric, chairs. Because I thought, ‘They could be anywhere, I’ve got to eliminate it.’”
For many bedbug sufferers, home is no longer a place they can go to feel comfortable. Without that space,
which most of us take for granted, where exactly do you go?
“I started to not want to go home,” Frank explains. “I wouldn’t go home until 9:00. Then I wouldn’t go to sleep. It’s kind of irrational, what happens with sleep: what’s the worst that can happen? You get bitten, and it’s itchy. But it feels different, it’s like you’re being invaded. And it’s very hard to feel like sleep is secure. So I would stay up until 3:00, 3:30, until I was exhausted. And I wouldn’t sleep in the bedroom. I took everything out of the bedroom, I wouldn’t even go into my bedroom. I started sleeping on the couch. So I slept on the couch for a while, and I thought, ‘This is okay.’ And then I felt like I was bitten again. And I thought, ‘Where do I sleep?’”
That’s when Frank finally decided to look for his long-lost Z’s in the car that night. At least there he could feel safe.
Yet it’s not only sleep that’s affected, Michelle explains. “I don’t think I realized how stressed I was by the whole thing. I got that it was tiring: ‘So I’m now going home every day and everything I’m wearing to work, I’m putting in the laundry.’ I’ve ruined a few articles of clothing. I threw things out. I had these really nice boots, and I found a bedbug in one, and I thought, ‘I’m not keeping this,’ — and I threw them out. There was a lot of spontaneous ‘All I want is to not have to deal with the bedbugs.’”
But it is only upon entering my mother’s house, for the first time since her discovery, that I begin to understand her sudden and potentially psychotic preoccupation with these bugs. The worst part is, that state of mind is surprisingly contagious.
After a mere three bites, my mother has already packed up all the clothes in the house to have them washed. Her existence revolves around getting rid of bedbugs, at all costs. She has started vacuuming incessantly, and unleashes pesticide into every corner of the house on a regular basis. She now jumps at the sight of lint on the carpet, and often feels she has bugs crawling on her skin — a condition that psychiatrists call “delusional parasitosis.”
Within the first three minutes of my visit to my mother’s house, I’m ordained into the cleaning rituals she has now perfected. I’m not allowed to put anything on the floor, and can’t leave the house wearing the same clothes I came in with. I also quickly come to discern that all objects — especially carpets — must be treated with utmost suspicion.
Upstairs is the epicenter of the infestation: my mother’s bedroom. I’m actually afraid to go in. It’s around this point that I start realizing how ridiculous all of this is, but I can’t help it.
What exactly is it about bedbugs that is so unsettling to people? Biologically speaking, bedbugs don’t carry disease. Aside from the fresh peppering of bites every morning, they can’t harm you physically. Yet for some reason, they are able to tear a person’s world apart, making them mistrust the place they rely on to find security.
“[Bedbugs] somehow seemed creepier than other things, like a flea,” Michelle speculates. “You know it’s not easy to get rid of, and that while you’re sleeping, they’re biting you, and they’re multiplying by the second. This is how they survive: they’re feeding on you. But you don’t see them. So it’s a bit crazy-making from that perspective.”
Even though months have passed since the experience, Michelle is still wary. “I’m hoping it’s come to an end. But I haven’t put my clothes back in the cupboard. So I’m not convinced, clearly. I’m a bit nervous about doing that, even though I know it looks like things are okay, and we’re not getting bitten. So we’re still living like that. It’s still kind of hovering. Just this week, I’ve had a few times when I’ve felt itchy. And I had forgotten how I was completely consumed by that.”
For those still consumed in the eradication effort, things are even worse.
As I’m cleaning out a downstairs closet with my mother, I see her suddenly jump up. She picks up something small and dark in her fingers, and asks me to look at it. It’s a pebble. She asks me whether I’m sure it’s not a bug. I’m positive, I say. Even so, she sprays down the spot with half a bottle of pesticide.
I’ve told my mother about my concern with all the pesticide she’s been pumping out all over the house. I’m pretty sure this stuff is more dangerous than the bugs themselves. All she does is answer dryly, “I’d rather die of pesticide than have bedbugs in my house.”
Unsurprisingly, one of my greatest fears over the past weeks has been whether I too will get bedbugs. When a friend of mine called to tell me she’d found a relatively widespread infestation at her house, I spent the rest of the day inspecting my apartment for any signs of bedbugs. Every spot of lint I found put me in states of panic which, in retrospect, I find laughable. But even now I still avoid putting my belongings on the floor. I never leave clothes on the bed and can’t help holding a particular aversion to fabric seating.
It’s difficult to say when things will finally be over, when things will return to normal. After an infestation, when does your house start feeling like home again? Can you ever get that feeling back?
“Oh no, it doesn’t feel the same,” says Frank. “I think I’ll be able to get back to it, but I think it’ll take several weeks. It is like a traumatic event, where you have reminders of it. No, I think it takes a while to recover.”
Frank grins as he muses over the seemingly irrational stress that threw his life into chaos not long ago. “I’m laughing about it now, but boy, when it hits you, you feel kind of homeless.”
