Perhaps one of the more annoying aspects of a bed bug infestation is that even when you don’t see them anymore, you still come across little discoveries like this just so you know they’re never really gone.

What you’re looking at in this yellow basin are bed bug shell casings. As bed bugs grow, they also grow a new shell which breaks the old shell, kind of like a snake shedding its skin. This basin was empty and under my bed for the last month. Now M and I can’t even remember the last time we saw a live bed bug or even been bitten by one, but this disgusting find serves as a friendly reminder that we should never rest easy. We should never stop inspecting our own homes, and most definitely, we should never stop cleaning. Most importantly this discovery serves as a reminder that those who have endured bed bug infestation should never, ever assume their homes are finally bed bug-free.

One of my financial goals if for M and I to have enough money one day to hire someone to do all this bed bug cleaning (the weekly mopping, the inspections, etc.) so we can somewhat relax.

Before yesterday, I hadn’t seen a live bed bug in my home for about a month, which is why I didn’t have much to blog about. But yesterday M and I were engaged in foreplay on the bed [we had misplaced our clothes ] and we were kissing when she stopped and told me I had a small brown bed bug on my cheek. Using her fingernails as tweezers she expertly plucked it off my face, and apparently the bug’s beak was still penetrating my flesh because it stung a bit as she jerked it off (the bed bug, not me).

Unfortunately, M and I are not swingers, so we instead invited our little go-in-between to a friendly game of Bed Bug Barbecue. Needless to say, the romantic mood was shot and we got dressed faster than a john in a haunted whorehouse.

My only dilemma, besides having seen a live bed bug in my home, is that I have no idea whether the bed bug was male or female. I don’t know whether I should just be grossed out or if I should join the Royal Navy.

But instead of unplugging the extension cord from the outlet back in November when I put away the fan, I simply left the extension cord on the floor, splayed out along the wall and still plugged into the outlet, without giving it a second thought.

Fast forward back to two days ago: I put the fan in place and get on my knees to plug it into the extension cord, except…

…there are bed bugs in the extension cord.

The extension cord itself is covered with little dots of bed bug feces, and live bugs are crawling out of it, and some dead bugs fall out of the cord as I pick it up. My eyes follow the length of the cord back to the outlet (actually it’s one of those box adapters that turn two outlets into six), where I can see a few specks of bed bug feces. Long story short, I replace the infested cord as M mops the area and carefully wipes down the outlet with rubbing alcohol.

I have no idea if the bugs that ventured inside the old extension cord sensed heat from the live electrical currents, mistaking it for body heat. If anyone knows if there’s any connection between bed bugs and electricity, it would be great if they could sare with the rest of the class.

I usually have a no picture policy at Bugged Out, but I thought it was necessary to show these photos. Let this be a lesson: watch your wires!

Bed bug sighting have been confirmed at the following subway stations:

• Fordham Road, Bronx
• Union Square, Manhattan
• Hoyt-Schermerhorn, Brooklyn

While only three out of the dozens of subway stations in New York City have had confirmed sightings, there’s no doubt in my mind that the others are just as contaminated.

Apparently, a bed bug workshop held in Greenpoint, Brooklyn last Thursday by the Department of Housing and Preservation Development slipped my radar; sorry about that. It’s detailed in most of the news articles and it seems this declaration by media is based on what was discussed at that workshop. Fortunately, a blogger in Greenpoint attended the event and provided details.

Just for fun I thought I’d start another poll asking readers to tell us which borough’s subway stations they have encountered bed bugs, if they have done so at all. Please, join in on the fun.

In a previous post, I related my own struggle with diabetes and attempted to draw parallels between that and my ordeal with bed bugs. I said that in both situations, the affected party must drastically alter their lifestyle, implement a routine of corrective as well as preventative measures, and that in both cases the idea of giving up crosses one’s mind at times.

One anonymous commenter stated the following, to which I feel I must respond:

Ok. I totally understand where you are coming from. Really I do. The “Don’t give up” speech. I would trade bbs for a disease anyday. Yes I would. Why. ‘Cause then my kids can have their character decorative pillows that they want. So my kids do not hafta live outta fu.kin’ plastic bags and ugly, stupid platic bins. So my kids can have their toys and go to school normally. Disease affects that one person only. Sure, family members get sad about the disease, but family members do not hafta be quarantined like some freak or deadly virus. You can have a beautiful home with a disease. I have, really have thought about suicide from this bb bullshit. I even wrote 2 suicide notes. I feel like an unfit parent for doing too little about the bbs in my home. I’m doing the best I can and yet I feel I cannot protect my kids and I feel overwhelmed and outta control. If it was just me living by myself, I really wouldn’t give a crap. Really. I would have no furniture except the basics like bed, tv, chair, that’s it. But, when you hafta raise kids and seeing what they hafta go through just breaks my heart. I want my kids to have a nice plushy couch to sit on and watch tv and beds, etc. I don’t even have their beautiful school pictures on the walls. This sucks!! How do families in other countries do this? I didn’t end it because when I wrote goodbye to my kids in my note I just cry and cry. I LOVE my kids. But the pressure from this bb bullshit has pushed me over the edge. I live in NY. Yes, I know NY is infested. But, I feel so alone.

Don’t tell me to see a therapist because I am.

Oh yeah, I don’t wanna read any comments from people saying that they’ve been there and that this can’t go on forever, etc. and that they understand. If you have bbs no more, then you do NOT know what I’m going through. Your ordeal is over, mine is not. You can move on, I cannot.

I understand where you’re coming from, lady. Seriously, I do. I know that’s exactly what you didn’t want to hear, but it’s my blog and I’m saying it. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone contemplating suicide because of bed bugs, though. Tell me you’re not seeing a therapist because of the bed bugs! Not that I’m making fun of your reaction or your situation, mind you. There were many times when I too considered looking for a therapist due to my bed bug problem, but my fiancee M was my rock. We really relied on each other for emotional support.

I don’t think you’re overreacting at all, but I do think you’re downplaying the impact a disease can have on a person and their loved ones. If, God forbid, one of your children was suddenly diagnosed with leukemia, would you be just “sad about it”, as you stated in your comment, or would it absolutely devastate you as you watched your child’s hair fall out and grow weaker each day, with little hope of recovery? I can’t even imagine how my life would be destroyed if M, God forbid, suddenly was diagnosed with a terminal illness.

My analysis is that you and your family have had a relatively easy life up until now, and this infestation is probably the only devastating event you’ve had in your life. If you grew up in poverty, if you were abused as a child, if you have a disease or have recovered from one, you’d have some perspective, something to which you can compare your current infestation, and realize that as bad as things are, they could be far worse and you’ve endured situations that were almost as bad as your infestation.

In your comment you asked how families in other countries deal with bed bugs, and they deal with it because their lives were probably a lot harder than yours even before they had bed bugs. I love my country, but Americans only read international news when it involves the United States. Right now, there are people in Colombia enduring a 30-year civil war, and in Congo and Darfur, people are being shot or chopped into pieces due to tribal genocide. In Sub-Saharan Africa two out of three adults and 90 percent of children live with HIV, according to the United Nations. In Somalia people were rioting over food prices. In the city of Odessa in Russia, 1 out of 4 men have HIV. And in Iraq…well, we all know what’s going on in Iraq. According to USAID, 2.7 million people worldwide die from malaria (with 90 percent of those deaths occurring in Africa), a disease that was wiped out in the U.S. and Europe in the early 20th Century, thanks in part to DDT-the same pesticide that was used to nearly wipe out bed bugs 50 years ago.

So how do people in other countries deal with bed bugs? At the risk of sounding arrogant, Americans on the whole live better lives than most of the other people on this planet. I’m a poor person in the wealthiest country on earth, and I’m a Latino in a country run by Anglos. I wouldn’t want to be poor anywhere else but America, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be an ethnic minority in any other country, either. I consider myself very lucky that I live in a country where so many people of different, races, ethnicities, religions and political beliefs get up in the morning and want to work together rather than slaughter each other. The people in other countries are surrounded by so much turmoil, when they do have bed bug infestations they have something to compare it to.

And please, don’t hate on the plastic bags and bins; they’re what’s keeping your lives somewhat more livable with the bed bugs while you try to completely eradicate those little vampires. That’s why I can’t sign on to this whole environmentalism movement. These limousine liberals all declare war on plastic, but plastic has basically saved my life simply because bed bugs do not like it. My books are on my shelves in plastic bins; I have plastic dressers, plastic hampers, and milk crates for extra storage. I just replaced my cloth curtains with vinyl ones and I sleep on a mattress that is completely covered in thick plastic and on pillows that are covered in plastic and covered again with pillow cases. The tree-huggers don’t understand what plastic means to poor people, and the way this economy’s going, a lot more Americans are going to be joining the lower classes. Besides, the idea that the earth needs to be saved by humans, or that humans could ever hurt the earth is ridiculous and arrogant. If the earth ever feels threatened by our species, it will get rid of us like it has to 99 percent of the other species which once inhabited this planet (mind you, millions of years before our primate ancestors even learned how to walk upright 200,000 years ago).

I also can’t get with the environmentalist movement because of their success in banning DDT, a chemical which lead to the near-extinction of bed bugs 50 years ago. Despite the fact that there was no unbiased research conducted on the environmental effects of DDT, one dead bitch wrote one book and it convinced the EPA to ban DDT in 1972. As a spokesman for the U.S. chemical industry famously said when the Carson’s book, Silent Spring, was published,

“If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we wou
ld return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”

Perhaps those days are upon us right now.

I don’t have kids, so I’m not even going to begin to pretend I understand what you’re going through. I do however, invite any bed bug sufferers who are parents to share their experiences and maybe even tips to help out a fellow parent in the same tragic situation.

As for my ordeal being over, you’re dead wrong. The problem with one’s home being infested once is the knowledge that it could very well happen again, either by accidental introduction of new bugs from the outside or a resurgence of bed bugs previously thought to have been successfully eradicated from one’s home. I’m not going to bother to buy any wooden furniture or try to revert my home to what it used to look like before my bed bug infestation, not until DDT is legalized in the U.S. It’s like fighting crime; the police know they will never keep their city crime free, but they do what they must to keep it as under control as possible and never allow it to get completely out of control. Just because crime is low doesn’t mean you leave your doors unlocked, and just because you don’t see bed bugs doesn’t mean you go back to the kind of environment bed bugs crave.

But I do appreciate your comment nonetheless, because I know there are many New Yorkers living with bed bugs who feel the same way you do. And I think your comment offers them some small consolation that they are not alone in this. If Bugged Out accomplishes nothing else, it should be to let New Yorkers and everyone else dealing with bed bugs that they are not alone. When I first launched this blog in January 2006 I certainly felt alone, and I don’t feel that way any more.

Keep the comments coming, and try to keep a positive attitude about all this, as impossible as it may seem. Might I suggest alcohol, or a less legal alternative?

I can imagine some people contemplating surrender to their bed bug infestation, wondering just how bad it would really be to stop vigorously cleaning their home, keep their infested furniture, literally swim in bed bugs, endure the constant biting and simply adapt to life plus bed bugs.

How can I imagine this? Because I’m diabetic.

With diabetes, every morning I have to check my blood glucose (sugar in my blood) level by pricking one of my fingers with a stainless steel lancet and literally bleeding onto an electronic glucose meter. Depending how high or low my blood sugar level is that morning from a normally healthy blood sugar level, I inject myself with anywhere from 25 to 45 units of insulin and swallow three pills. I have to watch what I eat, or eat less of it, and in the evening I take one more pill. I work out three or four times a week, and I’m supposed to go to my physician for diabetes management once a month, although I don’t always do that.

In addition, because diabetes symptoms always show first in the feet, I’m supposed to visit a podiatrist monthly. One of those symptoms is that the skin on the soles of my feet have died, and I have calluses on top of calluses, and I must spread moisturizer on the soles of my feet to keep the skin from cracking, which could lead to a small open wound and infections, which for diabetics are big trouble.

It’s a big hassle to do all this on a daily basis, and despite all these measures, a diabetic can still suffer any acute symptom of diabetes, which while are not as life threatening as severe symptoms, can still make life harder. Severe symptoms? The nerves in your foot can die, which means that unless you carefully inspect your feet everyday for things like infections, sores or ulcers, you’ll never know about it until it’s too late.

Like diabetes, fighting a bed bug infestation also consists of a constant routine. You will find yourself cleaning every day and deep cleaning at least once a week, or if you have the money, routinely hiring an exterminator to apply industrial-strength insecticide at the tune of $300 a room. Fighting bed bugs is a big hassle, too.

Because of diabetes, I’ve had to severely alter my diet and make a lot of other lifestyle changes (the moisturizer, the pills, the blood monitoring, the working out, etc.) and I still have diabetes complications.

I’ll be the first to admit, in terms of combating diabetes and bed bugs, that I don’t always take every precautionary measure every day. Seriously, who the hell has the time? People have to go to work, to school, run errands and have some semblance of a social life. Add the fact that I have two blogs, and yeah, sometimes a day will go by without doing a regular cleaning, or a week will go by that I don’t do deep cleaning. Sometimes I won’t check my blood in the morning (especially if I’m running late) and I just take my meds and hope I don’t get sick.

Fighting diabetes is like having a part-time job, as is fighting bed bugs. And when you factor in the job you have that actually pays money and all the other shit you have to do during the day, you barely have a life to live.

So in the back of your mind, giving up actually sounds like a good idea.

One thing I’ve learned (the hard way) from both diabetes and bed bugs is that if you don’t address a problem early, it will only get worse. And the longer you take to address the problem, the worse it will get. I was kind of in denial when I first saw a bed bug in my bedroom. I killed it and thought nothing more of it. By the time I finally convinced myself I had an infestation, I no longer felt safe sleeping with the lights off. Check out some of my earliest posts from 2006, when I had just awaken and smelled the proverbial coffee and began to tell my own tale of bed buggery. As a result of my inaction and denial, I ended having to throw out almost all of my furniture because numerous bed bug colonies had materialized within my bed, headboard and of course mattress.

I also had to learn the hard way about diabetes in 2005 on a trip to Florida. I was going through a stage where I felt if I didn’t eat a whole lot, I wouldn’t have to bother taking medication. FYI, the normal blood sugar level is anywhere from 100 to 150, depending on who you ask. While in Florida, I suddenly became very, very cold, shivering uncontrollably while sweating profusely. Anything I ate came right back up, and I was sleeping about 20 hours a day, too weak to even walk for more than a few minutes. My family drove me to the emergency room at a hospital in Daytona. My blood sugar was about 500, and the doctors said they were shocked I didn’t slip into a coma.

The whole time I was freaking out because I had no insurance and was horrified that I’d have to pay $2,000 or $3,000 for the hospital stay. Three days and two nights later I was released only because I swore to the doctors that I’d visit my own physician upon my return to New York. Florida state health insurance refused to pay my hospital bill because I was not a resident of Florida, and New York state health insurance refused to pay because I was not enrolled in the New York state health insurance plan at the time I became ill.

Six months later I received a bill from the Florida hospital for $12,000. I have yet to pay it since I was a college student up until last December, steady employment was hard to find, and the jobs I did find did not pay enough for survival and debt repayment. Needless to say, my credit rating is fucked.

As hard as it may be to believe, I still didn’t learn my lesson about diabetes. In 2007, I was working, not watching what I ate, not moisturizing my feet and racking up sugar levels of about 300 or so. Twice at work (I was working as a cashier) I threw up at the register and was asked to go home. M took me to the emergency room at New York Hospital Queens to find out what was wrong with me. I changed into the hospital gown and the nurse noticed a reddish-purple blister on my right foot near my little toe about the size of my fist. A podiatrist cut the blister open to find my foot had become infected. Long story short, x-rays determined that the infection has indeed reached the bone of my little toe and the only way to keep the infection from spreading to the rest of my foot was to amputate my toe.

I’ve learned my lessons, and am serious about taking all preventative measures (as numerous as they are) with regards to my diabetes as well as fighting a bed bug infestation. What troubles me, however, is the knowledge that I will always have problems with diabetes despite my greatest preventative efforts and that, unless I die an unnatural death, diabetes will most likely kill me. It also troubles me to know that despite my greatest preventative efforts, I can never really be sure my home is 100 percent bed bug-free and that my home will never suffer a re-infestation. But what keeps me going is knowing that the alternative, giving up, is far worse than doing what I routinely do to maintain a normal blood sugar level and suppress if not eradicate the bed bug population in my home.

Obviously, suicide is the most extreme and truest form of
giving up. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Protection, 32,439 Americans committed suicide in 2005. These are people who saw the predicament they were in and felt so overwhelmed, out of control and defeated that suicide appeared, at least to them, to be the only way out of it and the only thing in their life they truly had control over. I’ve met a few people who had diseases like HIV. cancer and MS, who had either seriously contemplated suicide or had attempted it. I even interviewed one young female basketball player for a high school sports article, who a week later, wrote a note stating she could no longer live as a Muslim and a closet lesbian before inserting her father’s gun into her mouth and blowing her brains out.

I’m not sure how to end this post, except to tell all of you, no matter how hopeless, out of control or overwhelming your bed bug problems may seem, no matter how unsympathetic the rest of the world may seem to your plight, don’t procrastinate in resolving your infestation, and for God’s sake, never give up!

The tenth or eleventh air mattress I’ve bought in almost two years just sprung another leak. Ever since I threw out my bed bug-infested mattress, bed and headboard two springs ago, I’ve placed my faith in inflatable mattresses in the fear that if I bought a new conventional mattress would only become infested and promptly thrown away. Besides, buying all that laundry detergent and fabric softener to wash my entire wardrobe and ammonia to mop and scrub my home got rather expensive, making the purchase of even the cheapest conventional mattress even more of a pipe dream.

Air mattresses (especially the ones that are under $50) are basically camping equipment and only meant for occasional sleeping and not everyday use to be slept on day after day for weeks on end. And they’re definitely not built to withstand a regular routine of vigorous sexual activity. Not to be terribly explicit, but M and I are both around 200 lbs. (she’s gonna crucify me when she finds I out I blabbed about her weight!), we’re in our 20s and we’re horny and in love. I think what we do in that bed has probably led to the many, many sprung leaks which have appeared in the many air mattresses we’ve bought.

The air mattresses I’ve bought range from $20 to $45 and are either made by Greatland or Coleman, the latter being a much weaker brand of bed. I really don’t have the money for an Aerobed or one of those fancy Eddie Bauer air mattresses and the widest variety is only available during the summer. During the winter, at least in New York, most stores don’t sell air mattresses, and those that do barely sell any at all. Since August I think I’ve bought about five air mattresses, all of which have sprung leaks. These mattresses do come with patch-up kits, but even these don’t hold for very long, and if they do hold another leak appears elsewhere. The mattresses are almost as much of a nuisance as the bed bugs themselves.

I finally broke down and decided to buy a conventional mattress on Sunday when M, after unsuccessfully trying to patch up a leak in our air mattress, declared that we’ve spent enough money on air mattresses to buy a conventional mattress. I couldn’t agree more. So I went to Sleepy’s yesterday and ordered a regular full-sized mattress for about $400. I cringed as the salesman kept pressuring me to lay down on the more expensive mattresses, afraid that a lone bed bug would somehow crawl out of my pants leg or something and onto the bed. And then he’d see it and make me pay like a million dollars for the bed. I cringed even more when he told me horror tales of buying mattresses from other retailers, who he claimed often pick up discarded mattresses from the curb, slap a new cover on them and then sell them as “new” mattresses. “Sometimes these discarded mattresses have bed bugs in them,” he warned in his spookiest tone. “And then you bring them into your home!”

If only he knew, he wouldn’t have even let me in the damn store.

Damn, I forgot how much money conventional mattresses sell for! Some of the more expensive ones (just the mattress, mind you. No frame or box spring) sold for $1,500 and even $2,500. I cut the salesman off in the middle of his pitch and told him I was looking to spend no more than $400 and he led me straight to the cheaper mattresses.

I really liked the inflatable mattresses, but I really need something that’s going to last more than a month or two. I plan to cover and seal the mattress with a heavy plastic drop cloth, the kind painters use to protect the floor and furniture from dripping paint. Not to perpetuate stereotypes about Latinos and the tendency to work as day laborers, but in my apartment, we have a six-foot steel ladder, various work gloves, safety goggles, a tool belt and of course, a 100-foot roll of heavy plastic drop cloth. When my mother purchased a new mattress (her old one became infested with bed bugs) last August, we covered it with the plastic and closed it shut with duct tape. Obviously, there is a crinkling sound that comes from the mattress whenever someone climbs onto the bed but to me it is a small price to pay to sleep bed bug-free. And when you consider that a mattress these days can cost $400 and up, it makes sense to do whatever needs to be done in order to keep bed bugs out of it.

I sincerely recommend that anyone buying a new mattress do the same. The drop cloth is not that expensive, and is a rather smart investment considering how expensive mattresses can be.

Did I also mention that they can fly?

So be happy that bed bugs is all you have, because there is a far greater menace out there that make bed bugs seem like Girl Scouts in comparison.

The first item of discussion is an article from 7 Online New Jersey’s Department of Health investigating a bed bug infestation in an apartment complex. The story itself isn’t that noteworthy, but here comes the kicker. One tenant’s infestation in her family’s bedrooms was so bad she moved their mattresses out to the hallway (presumably a hall in the apartment and not the hallway on the other side of her apartment door) because they were too scared to sleep in their bedrooms.

Is this lady a complete idiot, or am I losing my mind? What part of BED bug does she not understand? They’re not called bedroom bugs; they’re called bed bugs, and for a pretty damn good reason. It’s because they love beds, and if you have a bed bug infestation, chances are the bugs have first settled inside the bed, namely the mattress. So this mental midget basically dragged her mattress and the mattresses of her two children out to the hallway, along with all the bed bugs inside the mattresses. Soon, the hallway will be full of bed bugs and so will the living room with its comfy sofas. Smooth move, ex-lax.

Speaking of stupid, 7 Online made two embarrassing grammatical errors in their article. I understand this was probably a script that ran off a teleprompter for the on-air people (a.k.a., news puppets) to read aloud on camera, so maybe I’m just nitpicking.

I also want to rant about a good number of the insecticides out there on the market (mostly in aerosol spray form) that are allegedly good to use on bed bugs. These spray cans are never exclusively intended for killing bed bugs, but rather for a host of insects as well such as mites, roaches, spiders, water bugs, termites, etc. I, like many of you, have purchased one or two of these bug sprays if for no other reason than to satisfy my personal curiosity. These sprays usually offer mixed results, which make me wonder if they’re effective against bed bugs at all.

What really bothers me about these sprays is their inclusiveness, the fact that their labels claim they can be used to kill an array of pests including bed bugs. But we’ve been told over and over and over again (and some of us have learned through trial and error) that the pesticides that kill other insects do not really work on bed bugs. Therefore, the claim made by these sprays are an outright lie to me and gives me the impression that the spray was originally intended for those other pests but the spray’s manufacturer added bed bugs to the label regardless of whether or not the spray is effective in killing bed bugs. It’s 5am, so I’m not sure if what I’m saying is 100% coherent. Maybe the spray’s claims do make sense, and I’m the one who’s lost touch with reality.

I’m sifting through my bed bug-related Google alerts, looking for blogging material for Bugged Out and I’m eating Tostitos with salsa. It suddenly occurs to me that I must truly be desensitized to the “eewww factor” of bed bugs if I’m eating while reading about bed bugs and browsing through magnified images of the multi-legged creatures.

I’m not sure when exactly I stopped being creeped out by bed bugs. I remember this time a year ago, just thinking about them made me lose my appetite. I remember when I first saw a picture of bed bugs and started gagging at the notion that these tiny, disgusting things were crawling all over me and sucking my blood while I slept. But now? I’m blogging about them, and I’m still eating my chips and salsa. Yum!

Anyone else out these desensitized? If so, what are you eating as you read this?

Remember folks, when it comes to bed bugs, don’t be grossed out. Don’t be scared. Don’t be paranoid. Just be prepared.

Later.