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Wednesday we discovered we had bed bugs. For about four weeks I’d been getting welts, and assumed they were the result of an especially trying few months, along with the general drying up and shriveling from a combination of winter and–gasp–perimenopause. I even accused my mom of giving me hives. She said she was sorry.

Lo and behold, entire families of disgusting black critters were shacking up in my sage green Company Store comforter and sucking my blood as I slept.

Notice how I said MY blood. My husband got not one bite.

As soon as we knew, we kicked into panic mode. That day we washed all of our clothes in scalding water and dried them for an hour on high (nothing fits) and bagged them. We will be living in our not-big apartment out of Hefty bags for a week until we find out that they hopefully didn’t come back. Only then can we unpack. We stayed up all night doing 35 loads of wash and at 8 am promptly on Thursday morning, the exterminator came in, and told us way more than we ever cared to know about the disgusting little creatures.

The upshot: They are incredibly tenacious, can live for up to a year without food and that the females can hang onto their eggs for a really long time, which means if you get them all but one female, you may as well have not sprayed at all. Soon you’ll have a brand new colony living it up at your expense. Apparently we have a “mild case” but it’s hard for me to believe there is such a thing.

Nightmare.

We fell into bed that night on our freshly boiled bedding, and as I was about to pass out, my husband turned to me and said, “Do you know what the exterminator told me? Only one person in a bed gets bitten. They go for the person with the higher body temperature.”

I waited for the punchline. It had been such a bad day. There had to be a punchline. “See?” he said. “You’re still hot!”

Ba-dum bum. Kill me now.

Photo by   louento.pix CC