Mind Your Own God Damn Business

So, about three weeks ago, my brother got bedbugs. My little brother is not very aware of his surroundings, so he didn’t actually know that he had them. I just noticed that he was covered in bites one day and asked him what happened. Up to that point, I’m not sure he even knew that he was being bitten. Either way, we did the math and figured out that he had a pretty serious infestation. An exterminator showed up, sprayed down his box spring and that was basically the end of it.

At least, for him it was.

My bug phobia in full swing.

After that happened, I started going a little bit crazy. Every time something brushed me or touched me, I was convinced that it was a bug. I started having trouble sleeping. The sheets would settle or a breeze would blow over my leg and I would freak out. I started compulsively watching videos and reading pages and pages of information about bedbugs. I would spend two hours before bed every night reading about how they spend all day hiding and then come out while you’re asleep to suck your blood, or how they can survive for 18 months without eating if they need to.

Then, I woke up one day with a couple of bites on my knee. I tore off my covers and found a couple of tiny blood spots on my sheets. I immediately ripped the sheets off of the bed and started frantically searching around the mattress with a flashlight. I didn’t find anything, but the little blood stains were a pretty sure sign that I had bedbugs.

My first reaction was rage. I wanted to punch my little brother in the face for tracking parasites into the house. After talking myself down, panic set in. I started frantically washing all of my clothes and bedding in scalding hot water followed by super hot drying before sealing them in plastic bags. I called an exterminator. I briefly considered throwing away everything that I owned and sleeping on a cot surrounded by gasoline and glue traps. I was ready to tear out all of the carpeting and burn it in the back yard.

And the “Covered with Bugs” sensation that I had been struggling with got about one hundred times worse. I’m guessing that I looked like a PCP addict, furiously swatting and scratching at bugs that weren’t there. As I said, my parents are out of town, and they offered to let me sleep on their bed. That didn’t really make me feel any less buggy, but I did anyway, because it freaked me out a whole lot less than the idea of sleeping in my own bed.

Needless to say, I have not been sleeping very well for about a week now. My strict regiment of jittering and scratching at imaginary bugs combined with reading about bedbugs on the Internet to make sure I kept my anxiety level nice and high kept me from getting much more than three or four hours of twitchy, restless sleep a night. Even when I was 19 and could survive for a week on a fraction of the sleep I get now and a Twix bar, three hours wasn’t enough. Now that I’m a cranky old man, I can’t even control my bowels if I get less than 10. It hasn’t been fun.

Yesterday, the exterminator came over. After carefully inspecting my room, we managed to find one bedbug. He told me that I should calm down, I had caught things incredibly early so it was entirely possible that this was the only one who had been causing trouble, and that on a scale of 1-10, this was a 1. Then, he sprayed a bunch of poison around my room and on my mattress, which was way more reassuring to me than his kind words. We talked a little bit about DDT, which he talked about with the kind of fondness that I use when I talk about my first kiss or bite of ice cream. By the end of the conversation, I was ready to smuggle some into the country and start slathering it all over my body.

After spraying everything down, he told me that I should sleep in my own bed that night. The bugs needed to come into contact with the poison, and the best way to get them to do that was to sleep on my bed so they’d come try to bite me. After a couple of days, they would die. This made me happy.

But sleeping was still a little bit tricky last night. It was nice to be back in my room, with podcasts and the box fan to lull me to sleep, but as I was lying there, I started to think about the fact that I was lying on a poison soaked mattress essentially being used as a piece of bait. It wasn’t a very restful thought. Either way, I finally managed to doze off. When I woke up, I didn’t appear to have any bites and the sheets were clean. It’s a start. Maybe I’ll be able to quit scratching like a crack addict and actually get some sleep tonight.

Now please enjoy this video of a marching band performing “Da’ Butt”.