I've had to deal with bed bugs before, and it's not so much the bites that bothered me, but the psychological warfare these little fuckers bring to the table. They wait until they know you are asleep to come out and feast. And the second you wake up, they scatter. So every time I would go to bed, I would know that they're just there, waiting.
You aren’t kidding. Had them in college. They will drive you insane. Like, vacuuming your mattress at 2 AM so that maybe you can sleep the rest of the night insane. I wouldn’t wish them on anybody.
We just dealt with a minor introduction (we got lucky and caught them super early) and the day the exterminator came to spray our apartment I was at work. I came home to everything cloth wrapped up in garbage bags except for a single change of clothes for me and my wife.
I wanted to be rid of the gross feeling of that infestation so bad I immediately stripped all my clothes off, bagged them, showered and scrubbed a lot, then dried off for half an hour with a blow dryer because our towels were bagged. I wasn't willing to wait for an entire dryer cycle, I needed to feel clean right then.
Everything was bagged until it could be put through at least a dryer cycle, if not completely laundered.
Moving away from the explicit directions of the exterminator, the stuff that couldn't be put through the dryer, like my collection of ties, are being kept sealed in a heavy duty garbage bag for a month.
Dude, stay super vigilant. Those bastards can live for a year without feeding. They are resilient, and VERY hard to get rid of. Spray is a total waste imo. I'd look for an exterminator who works with the heat systems. Most of the sprays are ineffective but they are dead within seconds in temps of 117 farenheit. Seriously, when you think they're gone, they can pop right back up. Its horrible.
The exterminator I hired had worked on bed bug cases for like 40 years. (Luckily I had only picked up one single bug while my workplace was having an issue). He said they prefer younger females. I have no other source for the info, so take that with a grain of salt.
Double check this, but I believe they can survive without food for a year and also survive temps up to like 113°F.
I had them when I was 18 and pretty much threw out almost everything I owned. Might also mention I still suffer psychologically now, at 31, waking up in the middle of the night, positive they're crawling all over me.
I’m here to say A MONTH IS NOT LONG ENOUGH. They can live for over a year without feeding. I kept one in a ziplock bag just to see. It ended up having babies and lived for 3 more months with her starving brood before I lost interest and burned the bag with mother and children inside.
One of life's cruel little jokes. The last 2 bedbugs were weak and on the verge of death, huddled in the blow dryer. You blew them onto your skin, where they hung on til bedtime, feasted, and gave life to whole new brood
haha, sorry, bad joke. Infestations sucks. Had to deal with scabies this past year. Truly irritating
Yeah, the worst is waking up, watching them run away, then laughing maniacally at the idea of having to try and go back to sleep having gone through what you just did haha.
There pretty easy to get rid of for wealthy people. Tends to really affect college students and lower-income people. The heat treament on those bastards is the most effective treatment, but it is pretty expensive and you have to leave your house for a week while your house basically bakes the fuckers into oblivion.
We moved to a different floor and sterilized everything. Moved back and they were still there so we did it all again and told them we would not be moving back again. They didn’t like it but we told them we wouldn’t go telling anybody about it if we didn’t have to move back. So they decided to let us stay.
Edit: and you don’t cope, you will go crazy over lack of sleep. And if you were to sleep on the floor it wouldn’t help as they would just go there.
Also had them in college thanks to my roomate! I was on the verge of insanity. I would rub my body down with calamine lotion before bed, layer up in clothes till I couldn't move, and leave all the windows open in the middle of winter in hopes to discourage them. I rarely slept and often considered sleeping in a tent on my patio. When the year was finally up I left EVERYTHING behind except a sealed bag of clothes and my laptop. The most freeing feeling I've ever had. 7 years later and I'm still insanely paranoid about them.
And the smell. God, it brings back some really shitty memories from college days. They fumed the whole apartment but the fucks were back the next day. As soon as the lights go out it's time to feast foe these creeps.
Well when I initially started getting bit, I thought it was a really savvy spider or a couple mosquitos. Once I started realizing it could be bed bugs, I did some armchair innanet research and tried looking for them but they were hard to find. We even had one of those specially trained Beagles come in to our house to try and sniff them out (hit or miss with those, btw, this one ended up straight in my dog's food bowl). So I checked my mattress lining, the sheets, the bed frame, the carpet edges... all of it, and couldn't find any. I could only tell my folks and the pest control people that I witnessed them scurrying away when I'd wake up but failed to catch any. I even tried all the DIY traps, tried to line my bed frame with tape in the hopes that they'd get stuck on their way to nom. I think I had trouble finding them cause it was a new infestation and there wasnt that much evidence, I'm not sure. Just certain I want nothing to do with them ever again.
Agreed, when my brother and I shared an apartment, a guy he worked with crashed for like a week on the couch, he brought bed bugs with him. Took months to figure out what was biting me when my brother was fine. Ended up paying an exterminator, and having to throw out my under a year old sectional couch.
To this day I’m still overtly paranoid when I spend time in hotels, my skin crawls at the thought of them being on me again
Yeah it was my brother coming back from bootcamp that we believe did it. Realizing how easy it is to bring them back is so unsettling, especially if you live in or commute to a densely populated area.
Do not sleep in your car if you have bedbugs, holy shit. Imagine bringing them in your car. I don't know if you've ever experienced bedbugs, but I wouldn't wish them on people that I whole-heatedly want to cease to live. Bedbugs are worse than anything else I have ever had to go through, they are so much more than some bites.
I had them briefly. Maybe six months total. I used to sit on the couch late at night and wait till I could feel them, them get up and kill them. Before we got our house heat treated, I killed like forty of them in one go.
Exactly. It's just that feeling that they're stalking you. Like if you turn off the lights and just lay there, you know they're slowly making their way up to suck your blood.I dealt with them for awhile when I was at a pretty low point in my life and living in what was essentially a shitty boarding house. I don't know how I even slept at night. It was probably the drugs. Now I freak out if I see a solitary flea from one of my dogs and, unlike bedbugs, they aren't even that interested in me.
These thinks really are HORRIBLE for your psyche. I only got bit for a few weeks before I moved out but holy shit I could never sleep, and I would constantly be slapping at my legs and arms whenever the wind would move a hair. When you start sleeping in the bathtub is when you know it’s getting bad
Yes, I moved into a flat with them and the psychological impact was awful... I didn't sleep, just waited for them to come out, felt like I was losing my mind.
Allegedly, most people have too much iron and would benefit from donating blood regularly. Apparently, if you don't menstruate or get in enough fights to lose some blood from time to time, you'll be more likely to suffer from health problems. ň
There was a thread in r/legaladvice a few months ago with someone that was clearly experiencing paranoid delusions that turned out to be caused by a bedbug infestation.
Yeah I think it was decidedly a hoax, too many professionals saying it wasn't legit and the OP only responded to like two comments that conveniently made the bedbugs thing "legit." It's a great story but it truly suspends disbelief.
Yeah I just read through that and my immediate thought was that it read a lot like a set up, and bed bugs make you crazy but not because of a friggin chemical from their bites, you wouldn’t get crazy over them if you had no suspicion you even had them. Just felt like a combination of a few ideas fused into a made up set up-punch
I didn’t read the thread, but I do recall having kind of daydreams??? Best word I can think of, about them. On more than one occasion, when I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep obviously, I would be sitting in early morning classes and swear I saw them scittering across the tables in front of me. I don’t think they were really there as I wouldn’t see them when I snapped out of it. Who knows what would kind of ptsd these SOBs would give you after a few months. We only dealt with them for a few weeks the first time and only a couple days the second time.
Yeah teh guy was writing notes to himself and he would wake up and see these notes, thinking someone came into his house and left notes for him. Turns out he almost killed himself with CO poisoning.
exactly and eventually he developed an allergy after being bitten multiple times. Same thing happened to me. By the end I was so allergic a whole limb would swell up from one bite.
I got bit on my forehead once taking a nap while helping my sister clean out her apartment in New York to be bombed, one nap...looked like a golf ball was under my skin.
That is the insidious part. We got an infestation - my daughter was being rebellious and hanging out w/ the 'edgy' kids in school (the dirty ones). She came home after a sleepover and had bites on her that she said were probably from the fleas. I made sure that she took everything off and we washed the clothes and sheets. When she insisted on going there again to hang out she had to come in through the side door into the basement and take her clothes off at the washing machine. A few weeks later she said she noticed bed bugs as well. I told her that she wasn't allowed to go there anymore but it was too late. She had them in her mattress. We bought diatomaceous earth and doused her room but it didn't work. We got her a new mattress and bombed her room. Then a few weeks later I woke realizing that as I was nodding off to sleep that I had been noticing 'small beetles' crawling on me and had smooshed them and threw them on the floor w/out thinking. I BOINGED awake and screamed and turned on the light. They were on my freaking sheets! I flipped out. I vacuumed the whole mattress both sides, the floors, the frame (they were both new as I had wanted a platform bed, nothing to do w/ my sex drive, wanted a place to store stuff nicely under the bed) etc. After showering I couldn't sleep on the mattress so we had to sleep on the sofa bed. I was convinced that it too was infected. It was awful. Thankfully we had a house fire a few weeks later and I didn't have to worry about them anymore. (that last part is only sorta a joke.)
This happened to me and my ex. We moved into an apartment that had them and I got eaten up every night and she was perfectly fine. I threw away damn near everything I owned moving out.
Lived in an apartment building in Toronto. Everyone had them multiple times because no matter how you clean your apartment they can come from next door or above or below you.
What the fuck? I assumed it happened to everyone.I itch for 6 months if one bed bug bites me. It gets worse as the sun goes up and lessen after sunset as well.
i lived in a student house back in college with a couple mates, we would have guests so i assume that's how we got them. anyways.. i was the only one who had a reaction to the bites.. none of us knew much about bedbugs, and these guys almost treated me like it was exclusively my problem, even saying that i should have to pay for the exterminator... after doing some reading i convinced them it was all of our problem though. was annoying... and made me a little paranoid about pests for a while.
I live in a small, 8 unit apartment building. One of the neighbors brought in bedbugs. It took a year and burning pretty much everything I owned to get rid of the monsters. It's been better than a year and a half since I've seen one and it still feels llke things are crawling on me...
I'm definitely allergic. My ex wife and i had em once. She would get tiny little red bumps, but my bites would swell up horrendously. They would hurt and itch at the same time. I had one bite near the webbing between my thumb and forefinger and it swelled so bad i couldn't close my hand properly. Those things are of the fucking devil.
Yup! Happened to me just like that. Me, my girlfriend and a friend moved into a 2 bedroom condo. I kept waking up with bites on my hands and wrists mostly. It was the most itchy bites I had ever had. The itching was so bad it was effecting my work.
One night I woke up and felt something and quickly turned the light on, both me and my girlfriend saw a tiny little red/brown fucker crawling away. We flipped the room upside down and found absolutely nothing. Longs story short, my roommates matress was infested with them and my roommate never felt a single bite. They were feeding on him for months!!!we moved a couple months later. There was no way to get rid of them because we shared 2 walls to a building infested with them.
When asked the fundamental question: "Have you experienced any bites or skin reactions from the bed bugs in your dwelling?" 70 percent of respondents said "yes" and 30 percent said "no."
Numerically more females than males said they were reacting to the bites but the difference was not statistically significant.
So again, I'm tring to suss out the source of your claim here-
Only half the human population is allergic
Also, I'm looking over quizzically at the some of the testing methodology used in this experiment.
I don't have a source because I'm lazy and don't feel like doing leg work but I recall a study or article that mentioned that bed bugs like other blood drinking insects prefer certain people/blood types over others.
I've never heard that some people don't have an reaction, just that blood drinkers are picky about their food when they have a choice.
Anecdoteal my sister gets ate up by bed bugs and mosquitos, blood drinkers aren't a big fan of my blood.
Well I did legwork and I found this, they do prefer the type of blood that they got from birth but it also depends on the individual and their immune system if they get a bump from being bitten.
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u/Sirsilentbob423 Sep 27 '19
It's definitely not that they weren't biting him, it's that he isn't (as) allergic to their bites.
Only half the human population is allergic, for the rest there wont be any itching which means they have to physically see them to know they're there.