To be from now and forward referred to as “Bugs and Daffy Day” since that sounds a lot better than the “Day of the Bed Bug Infestation From Hell.”
Yes, you read that right, we figured out that our little “Hister beetles” were actually bed bugs!
Ugh.
Ack!
Gross!!!!
So how does that happen? We have no idea how these creatures got into our home. We’ve been in our home just over five years. We have had as many brand new beds too. Each one had different issues or larger problems with a lump in the middle, so we weren’t terribly tied to any one of them. The one we had (notice the _had_ part) we’ve had for over a year now and I figured we would be replacing the one we’ve been on in the next six months to a year. That would happen a lot faster than I could have imagined.
We’ve both been reacting to something for about a month and had what we thought was a simple rash: arms, wrists, a bit of Michael’s belly, each constantly itching with red spots in a diffuse pattern. I’ve tried to analyze our diet and our environment and could not nail it down since nothing really changed in our physical environment in the past month. We have lost two pets very unexpectedly, so I was wondering if maybe it was just stress manifesting itself. I wish that had been the problem!
I’m not going to go into the gory details of the cleanup, but over the nine hour day it entailed throwing out our box springs, sheets and mattress pad, plus putting anything and everything that was not in a drawer (e.g. the clothes that had been all over the floor, clean and dirty alike) back into the laundry to be washed on hot. There was massive amounts of vacuuming, lots of stuff thrown in the garbage, a trip to many stores to get zippered mattress cover, new pillows plus zipper covers for them, bug spray and one of the three bags of diatomacious earth left in Fairbanks.
I have no idea how we got them. But they will not be coming back!