Turn Out, Yep Bedbugs

So if you didn’t read My Sick Story I’d fill you in real quick: I’ve been sick, lots of allergic reactions, tiered, back, stomach, all over pain, and migraines. They thought it was bedbugs, my laundry detergent, food, and all sorts of other things that we eliminated along the way. I’ve been having rashes for months and turns out that in fact we do have bedbugs.

We moved back in mid July, we found out two days before the move that the building had bedbugs. We did everything we could think of to make sure we didn’t bring them into our new place and thought we were in the clear. We didn’t see one anywhere and went on with life.

Last week I was in the hospital (emergency room) with extreme stomach pain (unrelated to the bugs, but at the time we didn’t know the bugs were still a problem so the thought was I was having allergic reactions to something; the signs and symptoms being the rash, tiredness and the pain). Eight hours later and (9pm-5am arg!) they said they couldn’t find anything and sent me home. I was still in some pain but it had gotten a bit better.

We went home to sleep (and we did a bit) but I woke up with the feeling of something crawling on me. I quickly pulled back the sheets and sure enough a bedbug!! I quickly turned on the lights and found another one in the bed. I got Marshall up (not that easy to do when he’s really sleeping) and told him this was it, we’re flipping the bed. We did and I was not happy with what we saw. We had put some foam between two wood board because they would make noise every time we got on the bed. The bugs where all living in those cross sections, in the foam (thankfully we had pillow and mattress covers). I sort of did a little freak out as they started to crawl around. I didn’t totally know how to catch them so I got out a lint roller (you know, the sticky tape kind) and started rolling them up (not the best idea ever but I was still half asleep and it was the closed option at the time. It surprisingly does work well!).

Needless to say the last four days have been full of cleaning, laundry, bagging and storage binning all our clothes, and doing lots of research on what we all should do, and where we should all check for these buggers. My mom came over as well and used her high powered steamer which also does an amazing job because of the heat to kills and catch them (we had a lot come out of hiding as she came a long with the steamer). After all that we sprayed down the whole house and stayed the night at my mom’s.

It’s a very frustrating problem, especially seeing as we thought we already sorted this out the first time we were worried. People keep saying “Well at least you know what your rash is from!” which yes, it is good to know, but I still have all my other items/health issues to deal with, and I’m not 100% sure that this rash is just from them. I’m still planning to go for more testing and I’m kicking into the second phase of my Cadida diet in a couple of days so here’s to getting better! Here’s to fixing my body and killing those frickin’ bugs!!