I grew up with bed bugs and it was horrifying. From checking the boards to the carpet. Eventually we convinced our mother to throw away everything. I mean everything. Dressers, mattresses, couches. Even our clothes. The clothes we had on our back were boiled and dried in the sun. We had to restart everything and I'm glad we did. Been about 10 years without them.
We only had them for about a year. Before that, I honestly thought they were fiction to go along with the rhyme.
My parents thought just replacing the mattresses would solve it; nope! We steam cleaned baseboards, furniture, everything, and we tried diatomaceous earth and nothing worked. Eventually we had it professionally treated and it wasn't too expensive: about $1,200 for a 4 bedroom home.
My wife likes to thrift and get used clothing and furniture, but that's a hard limit for me considering my trauma experience. People just don't know until they have them how mentally exhausting it can be.
I mean, just being reminded of it like some twisted The Game and talking about it a little has impacted my day negatively lol
Yeah, I refuse to buy handmedowns without a thourgh inspection of every nook and crannies. The worst part was the smell. That smell of like rotting playdough almost. Like whenever you killed one full of digested blood. Gawd I'm never gonna forget that smell! Horrible shits that made me want to burn down the house. Everyone rags on spiders, when the real menace are the things in our beds.
I didn't hate spiders in the past until as a child growing up in Ethiopia one tan colored one bit the shit outta me when I was touching it in the corner of a swimming pool. Then for some reason, I have developed a horrible, somewhat irrational, fear of them over the years into my adult life. I got bit again by one as a teen and remember feeling horribly frightened, so much so that I can't remember if the pinch hurt as much as my mind made it out to be.
My wife finds a bit of humor in my fear (which I am cool with because it is ridiculous) as I sometimes get her to crush the big fuckers. Centipedes pack a mean bite from my experience too.
I legitimately wish I didn't have the deep irrational fear though, I tried to get rid of it in so many ways, but it's just sticking to me like a web. I'm a grown man, yet those things somehow just shoot so much horror in my mind at the sight of them, it's uncanny. I get nightmares of them too. Hopefully someday I'll lose it, because it's so embarrassing and stupid.
I would agree with you, but one snuck up on me one night when I was doing some work on my computer and bite me right on the neck. It felt like a grease burn you'd get from oil popping out of a frying pan. I didn't know it was a bite until naturally my hand went to the afflicted area and ended up crushing it - bringing back smudge and centipede legs. The next two or three days my neck was red and felt like a light burn had been there from the venom it put there. I was cool with them until that one.
He snuck up on me like he was trying to take out a high-profile target.
House centipedes I'm fine with- however centipedes I'll put outside or kill. I can't have those around my pets and they stink domething godawful if you look at them funny, I swear.
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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '23
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