the ones that live in your head

I was itching. Red bumps appeared in clusters, first on my wrists and eventually on my arms and torso. I went to my doctor; she advised that I take dairy out of my diet. The rash persisted. I'd wake up in the middle of the night scratching. I went to another doctor; they prescribed a cocktail of antihistamines. After several visits, it was decided that if the rash persisted unexplained, it be wise to have a biopsy.

"For what?" I asked my dermatologist.

"Well, to rule out things like Lupus or Leukemia."

Being Jewish I am a natural born alarmist; I left that office convinced that I was going to die. It was March of 2006, over a month since I fist started noticing the itchy red bumps on my body. As I walked into the one bedroom apartment I shared with my husband in Chicago, I gently told him what the doctor had suggested. His Libran brain gives him the ability to be rational; my Leo personality needs his balance in moments like this. Like any young couple faced with such uncertain news, we ended up sharing a bottle of wine as I asked him questions about the girls he will date after my certain death. We laughed it off and went to bed.

It was a Sunday; we were driving over to the condo we were buying. As we made our way I looked at my husband and said, "I have a feeling some really fucked up is about to happen only I have no idea what."

His eyes squinted a bit and he said, "I hate when you say things like that because you are usually right."

That evening we were home flipping channels. Dateline NBC is showing a story about a woman and her daughter that stayed in a NY hotel. Apparently their room was infested with bedbugs (something I always thought were more myth than real), the woman was covered in bites, ending up in the hospital. She was suing. They showed photos of her legs, covered in these deep red clusters. They itched. They were in straight paths along her blood lines. The anchor of the show went through the process of how to determine if you have a bedbug infestation. My husband and I looked at each other and then he said the words that would send our lives into a wreck for the following months, "Those kind of look like the marks you have. Should I go check our room?" I wanted to say no, only because I feared the possibility of it being true. He pulled the bed back from our wall and there we found the moltings, evidence of the infestation. The image of his arm holding that dustpan and the look of disbelief on his face is forever imprinted in memory. After my mother and brother came over to help us get rid of the bedding and random objects in and around the bed, I packed a plastic bag with my toothbrush and left wearing only the clothes I had on. Somehow my husband managed to spend the night there, and we slowly began to deal with the problem.

I knew immediately that we must have brought the bedbugs home from our recent vacation in Mexico. As public school teachers, we decided to treat ourselves to a top of the line all inclusive resort in the lush Riviera Maya. While there, my husband noticed a few small bites on his back. We assumed they were mosquito bites or some strange tropical bug. We didn’t really worry about those bites, we were preoccupied with the pool and the endless supply of alcohol; the perfect remedy for stressed out teachers. Once we discovered the problem in our own apartment, and did a bunch of research on this critter, the only likely source was our hotel room in Mexico. We had lived in our apartment for close to three years. We even got engaged in that apartment. After we discovered the bugs, we never spent another night in our apartment. We stayed with our families until our condo was ready and we only went back to the old place to finish dealing with our belongings. Our landlord, even after seeing the bugs, accused us being paranoid, calling us disturbed. Damn right, I thought to myself. I am paranoid. We are deeply disturbed. We’d been sharing our bed with bugs that used my dreaming hours to get fat off my blood. Our landlord agreed to have the apartment treated once by a professional. He would not allow us to treat it again; apparently this was some type of punishment he deemed reasonable to bestow upon the paranoid and disturbed. My heart breaks for the poor soul that moves in there next. Bedbugs can live close to two years without a blood meal. They will simply wait for a new host to feed on.

We lost almost everything we owned, as we couldn't properly treat our belongings thanks to our landlord, and because I didn't want to risk moving the problem to a new condo. The pest control company we hired to treat the pieces we were trying to keep, kept repeating when we’d ask specific questions about the bugs being in certain items, “Well it’s possible, but not likely.” Since I felt we had just experienced the unlikely, we thought it best to start replacing instead of saving. We never really bought much furniture when we got married, so we decided to take our savings and buy it all in a one sweep. We also disposed of most of our clothing. I cried as I lowered all my shoes, tied up in black garbage bags, into the dumpster. It was like burying a pet. On the bright side, I’m no longer wearing my mother’s clothes as I was those first few weeks. Also, getting dressed is much easier as I currently can count my shoes on one hand, and if a pair of jeans goes missing, I actually miss them. We lost a lot, took extreme measures to save our book and record collection, but placed very little value when deciding on the rest. The fear of the invisible stays with us both. I guess that is what we miss the most, something that will take ages to come back. Peaceful sleep.

A few weeks ago my husband and I stood in the alley behind our old apartment building. The scavenger company came and broke apart our furniture and sofa and kitchen table with a mallet. We watched shreds of wood spread around the alley, landing in rain puddles. I stood there freezing, slowly inhaling a Marlboro. A neighbor called down, wondering what we were doing getting rid of perfectly good furniture. We just smiled and sort of laughed. We could get away with such behavior now. After all, we were paranoid and disturbed. We went home, disrobed in the hall, and showered immediately. The whole experience from start to finish, not counting the loss of our personal items, cost us close to $12,000.00. That's a lot of money for a young couple starting out. I try to concentrate on the fact that physically, I am healthy. Mentally…well that might just take some more time. As a pest controller I telephoned recently said to me, while I begged him to sell me bedbug sprays for our new condo, “Honey, the only place those bugs are living right now is in your head. No spray is going to kill the ones that live in your head.” Needless to say, he was right.

-a traumatized soul in Chicago, Il