For those of you who know me personally, you know that rarely am I able to post a blog in a timely manner. Now, this is not because I am a particularly slow typer or a chronic editor of my own work. This is due to the fact that what I typically blog about are subjects which are a little painful and hard to admit to the public at large (or at least all 12 of my followers, 10 if you don't count my parents). It takes me awhile to process these traumas before I can share. So what I am about to tell you hits a little close to home. So close, you could even say it was in my very own bed.
For the past year at work we have been battling, like much of the country, or at least Niketown and the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, a problem with bed bugs. It's bound to happen in close communities, especially when you are dealing with the homeless population, and especially when you work for a nonprofit with limited resources. Needless to say, this situation has been a plague upon my pre-existing anxiety disorder. Every time anyone at work even mentions being bit in one of our housing projects, I start feeling itchy. I realize the lunacy of it, but it's sincerely out of my control. Once again, I am a therapist and so I know this is what we call a compulsion. I can't help it...and if you don't believe that this is how it works, watch the show Hoarders on A&E. Talk about compulsions. My apartment is actually usually quite clean and orderly (and now, especially minimalist) in spite of the fact that I have two pets. This comes from being raised by a mother who had a close, personal relationship with the vacuum cleaner throughout my childhood. Apparently, compulsions are genetic, which is a fact that came in handy when I had to later make a phone call to my landlord.
So, rewind several weeks when we had reached our pique of bed bug infestation at work. The agency was finally breaking down and exterminating the entire apartment building our clients live in and the staff was being forced to help the clients prepare. "You mean we are supposed to go into their apartments where we know there are bed bugs and help them pack everything in preparation for extermination?" My boss did not look too happy with my apparently elitest sounding questions, so I shut my mouth and made up my mind to assist from the doorway. It just so happened that our infestation coincided with the news media sensationalizing bed bug outbreaks pretty much every hour on the hour. "Breaking news: we're going to show you more creepy looking pictures of bed bugs while you are eating your breakfast." Thank you, Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira.
I know myself, and I know I should have turned off the television a long time ago. I know that a few years ago when gas prices were being hiked up higher and higher and almost reached $5/gallon here in LA, I was convinced (along with some very compelling writers at TIME magazine) that it was connected to the impending global food shortage and I was picturing myself withering away from starvation after being forced to eat nothing but rice for four years on end. I know that at the mention of salmonella poisoning on the news I am much happier to toss everything from my refrigerator and dog food pantry than to risk the pooch and I eating fecal matter and dying. (How embarassing of a eulogy would that be?!) And I know that I could only be forced to watch so many news stories on bed bugs and see so many bites on clients at work before I was convinced that I had a few extra roommates myself, I type as I continue to scratch my arms furiously.
Questions I should have asked myself: 1) Do you have any bites on your arms and legs? 2) Have you seen any actual bugs on your linens, clothes, or sheets?
Had I asked myself these questions, I probably could have avoided a three-day panic attack and dropping a week's salary at Bed, Bath, & Beyond. However, I did not, and instead, what I did was notice a few small, brown flecks at the bottom of my laundry basket when I was doing my laundry one Sunday. And I have already told you about my Monday morning breakfast convo with Matt and Meredith, which then got me thinking: were the little brown flecks at the bottom of my laundry basket evidence that I was officially bringing my work home with me? So I did the only rational thing one could do which was to call my most equally-neurotic friend on my way to work.
Questions she could have asked me: 1) Do you have any bites on your arms and legs? 2) Have you seen any actual bugs on your linens, clothes, or sheets?
Now, to her credit, I was pretty much already convinced I was infested and thus doomed to shave my head, burn all of my furniture, clothes, and linens, sell my car (because after all, I hadn't sprung for the leather seats and therefore the cloth was most likely infested as well) and then move to a new apartment. It's not like I was asking her to talk me down off the ledge; I was telling her to help me crawl out the 54th floor window. Her advice: "Check your mattress."
After a painfully long, eight hour work day, I walked through my front door, ignored my hyper-active, hungry pooch and went straight to the mattresses. Yes, it was Godfather-style, but no, not in the way you think. And sure enough there were exactly four of the same little brown flecks I had seen in the bottom of my laundry basket. Begin: panic mode. I immediately stifled a sob and then ripped the sheets off of my bed, bundled them up with the pillows and my duvet cover. I marched back out the front door with said linens in hand and made a deposit straight into the dumpster. There was no way I was going to sleep for one more second in sheets or on pillows that I had been sharing with new found friends from work. Fortunately, I did have the wherewithal to strip the duvet cover off of my down comforter, rather than simply throw everything away. Now that would have been excessive. Plus, I figured that I could dry clean the comforter and that would surely erase any memories of creepy bedfellows.
I then proceeded to make a few panic-stricken phone calls to friends and my parents, none of whom could really understand me and all of whom suggested I call my landlord and (not in so many words) get a grip. The phone call to my landlord did nothing but secure the notion that I was a dirty slob as her response to me was, "In all my years, I have never had a tenant get bed bugs." Nice. In all your years you probably never had a tenant with a pathological penchant for catastrophizing either. But like I said, my mother trained me well, and in the many times my landlord has been in and out of the apartment this past summer (see "Just call me the Godfather"), she knew I was right.
Fast forward two hours later, all my clothes were in piles separated by what was to be thrown away, what was going be donated to Goodwill (assuming they didn't mind traces of creepy crawlies), what could be washed and what would have to go to the dry cleaners along with my comforter. I stopped the mental tally in my head somewhere around $1000 to replace the linens and wash or dry clean everything I owned. A small price to pay to be able to truly live alone. A knock on the door proved to be my afore-mentioned equally neurotic friend, as well as two other more rational ones, to make sure I hadn't yet slit my wrists in panic. Needless to say, all were surprised when I shoved a ziplock baggy with one of the critters I caught in their faces. In retrospect, was it surprise or perhaps something more like disgust? This shock, if you will, quickly turned to empathy after the roomful of iphone "bed bug" google images confirmed we had a positive ID. The exterminator will come and it will all be over soon, they cooed, over the sound of my garbage can taking a shower. (Don't ask, but it made sense at the time. Disinfect everything.)
The rest of the story is fairly anti-climactic. The exterminator came out and after less than 30 seconds in my apartment confirmed that I had fallen victim to the media hype (along with about 40 other cases she had recently seen - maybe she was just trying to make me feel better, but it worked). My four friends were not bed bugs, but in fact, a rather harmless, non-breeding, non-invasive critter known as the cigarette beetle. "But I don't even smoke!" I exclaimed to her before my nerves had yet to calm down. I interpreted the look she gave me then as sympathy, but maybe it was disappointment in the finder's fee she would no longer be receiving because her company would not be able to charge my landlord a ridiculous amount of money to rid the apartment of bed bugs. Whatever the case, I was elated. Until I thought about the dumpster full of my former belongings. Again, in an attempt to make me feel better, the exterminator suggested I get them back out. Um, hello? Did you not just pick up on the fact that I would rather have no sheets or linens and but half of my former wardrobe rather than be surrounded by things that had once touched the idea of a bed bug? And now you are suggesting I crawl into my dumpster to re-outfit my bed? No, thank you.
Fortunately for me, Bed, Bath, & Beyond was in the middle of some great sales, and this all happened right around the time I would have conducted my biannual apartment (and life) scrub-down anyway. Truthfully, it was cathartic to rid myself of anything that hadn't seen the light outside of my closet in over a year, even if it was an interesting piece of wood I found in a store in Belize. And fortunately for me as well, cigarette beetles are not something you get from being dirty, a bad tenant, bad employee, or bad daughter, but in fact, something you carry into your home in boxes, which means that I could have brought them in along with a new pair of shoes. Or at least that is the story I am telling myself, and that is how I am falling asleep at night. So sleep tight, and don't let...well, you know how the story ends.
Cute story. Good ending too!
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