Our thought and our prayers go out today to all the family and friends of the victims of the assault at Virginia Tech this past Monday.
In May of 2005, I posted a couple of pictures that I took of Billy after being bitten by bedbugs. That prompted a few questions from people about how we got rid of them. With the growing awareness of bedbugs and their comeback, I thought I’d finally tell our story.
Back in July of 2002, we were getting ready for our annual trip to the beach. About a week before we left, we noticed bug bites on Billy’s legs. This didn’t seem unusual since he spent alot of time playing outside. After returning from the beach, we noticed that they weren’t getting any better. Instead they seemed to be spreading up his body. We took him to a doc-in-the-box and he was diagnosed with chickenpox. It didn’t look like chickenpox to me, but I wasn’t the doctor. After a week, he wasn’t improving so we took him to his pediatrician. Instead of chickenpox, they thought it was some kind of allergy so they referred us to an allergist.
Over a period of ten weeks, they performed various allergy tests (yes, the scratch tests), multiple times and concluded that he had a wheat allergy and put him on a no wheat diet. For those who don’t know, wheat is in just about EVERYTHING. About the fourth day into the no wheat diet, I was waking Billy up for daycare and noticed something move on his bed out of the corner of my eye. I quickly turned on the lights (it was still dark) and at first couldn’t find anything. Later that day, I mentioned it to my mom. She did a bit of checking on the web and came up with bedbugs and suggested I look into it. I did a bit of research and found that bedbugs shed their skin like a snake and will leave little husks around. I searched Billy’s room with a flashlight and, bam, I found husks. Unfortunately the fun was just beginning.
Still not completely believing in bedbugs, I took the husks to the local branch of the Virginia Cooperative Extension. They weren’t sure what kind of insect it was so they had it sent off. Over the next few day I continued to gather information about bedbugs. I learned quite a bit about bedbugs and their history and, sure enough, the extension office confirmed that they were bedbugs.
During this time, Billy slept in our room while we tried to figure out what to do. After inspecting the room, I concluded that the bed was the primary source of infestation. The extension office wasn’t sure how to treat them since nobody had been having problems. Since my mom worked in new construction, she new the name of a pest control company that she thought would help us out. They gave me a pesticide that they thought would do the trick. We were supposed to brush this stuff all over the bed. I recalling thinking that this wasn’t going to work, because the chemical was a salt based product used for wood boring insects. I assumed the pest people knew better than I did. We did two things. The first thing we did was wipe EVERYTHING in Billy’s room down with rubbing alcohol. Stuff (like stuffed animals) that couldn’t be easily inspected was thrown away. The second thing we did was take the bed downstairs and brush the pesticide all over it. This had the lovely side effect of eating away all the varnish.
A quick note about the bed. This bed is a family antique that belonged to my great grandmother and it was/is important to me to preserve it. Anything else would have been torched.
Since all the varnish was gone, I had to re-varnish the bed. Since it’s an old bed, the joints were loose, there were all sorts of nooks and crannies for bedbugs to get into. But between the pesticide and the varnish, I thought that would definitely take care of it. Martinah was nervous about Billy sleeping in his room that first night. I was confident that we’d taken care of the problem. The next morning I took these pictures.
I contacted the pest control place again and they said we would have to fumigate the house. A couple of days later they came and did the house. The day I was able to go back in, I went straight to Billy’s room and found live bedbugs on the mattress. I took the bed out of the house for good and had them come and fumigate the house again.
This time I could find no evidence of living bedbugs. We bought Billy a toddler bed and I filled every seam, nook and cranny with clear caulk. I put glue traps under each bed leg and Vaseline on the base of each bed leg. (I had read that they would get trapped in the trap or the Vaseline. I also read later that they are smart enough to crawl up the wall to the ceiling and drop down too, but I didn’t know that at the time.) About a month went by and we didn’t find a single bug or have a single bite. We were in the clear… or so we thought.
One morning Martinah woke up with a cluster of welts on her leg. I’d seen this before: bedbugs. I inspected our room and found one single bug which I immediately disposed of. Since I couldn’t find any other evidence, we took a wait and see approach. Fortunately, we have never found any more.
We never did come to a concrete conclusion on where they came from. By the time we figured out what was going on, there was little evidence to indicate where they started. For a while we thought somehow they came in on the bed since it had been in storage. However, there wouldn’t be any reason for them to be in the bed in the first place without a food source. We had gone to the Bahamas (Martinah and I) that spring, but we never had an infestation in our room (just the one bug). Nobody at daycare had reported anything so that didn’t seem a likely source either. That will probably go unsolved.
To this day, anytime any of us gets a bug bite, the hair on my neck stands up. It was never painful. Billy still isn’t aware of what happened and doesn’t remember a thing. But for Martinah and I, it was very traumatic. However, I do feel we were VERY lucky. I’ve read stories of people having pest control treat 5 or 6 times before they were eliminated.
Some factoids:
- bedbugs can live for a year and a half without eating
- bite marks look like mosquito bites but are generally in a line or are clustered
- they will leave little red stains on the sheets where they have traveled
- they like to hide during the day
- they are attracted to carbon dioxide and and can detect it from about 15 feet away
- they like to hitchhike on blankets and clothes
- they like to live in nooks and crannies in furniture, behind pictures, wallpaper, and baseboards
- they don’t fly and like to stay close to their food source
- they are very hardy and are difficult to kill in quantity
- they are unlikely carriers of disease, although I’ve read that they can transmit Hepatitis B in rare circumstances
Some links:
I won’t go into the details here, but simply say be very cautious before playing a CD from Sony/BMG in your PC. The articles below provide alot of details.
- Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far
- Hackers use Sony anti-copy software to hide in PCs
- Google Search
UPDATE:
Last week some friends of ours let us know about a new radio station in Richmond: 98.9 Liberty. It plays a mix of pop and rock from the 70’s to the present. So far there are no commercials or DJs. If you are in or passing through Richmond, Virginia, give it a try.
In the wake of hurricane Katrina, we want to encourage everyone to help out in any way you can.
The below addresses were extracted from NBC12.
American Red Cross
[ Website ]
Greater Richmond Chapter
P.O. Box 27006
Richmond, VA 23261
1-800-HELP-NOW
The Salvation Army
[ Website ]
Richmond Area Command
P.O. Box 12400
Richmond, VA 23241
Virginia Baptist Mission Board
[ Website ]
Disaster Relief
2828 Emerywood Parkway
Richmond, VA 23226
Church World Service
[ Website ]
P.O. Box 968
Elkhart, IN 46515
Catholic Charities
1-800-919-9338
[ Website ]
Photo taken by Dean Hoffmeyer of the Richmond Times Dispatch. Used with permission.
Henrico county residents trying to get their hands on $50 ibooks. Check out this post.
A rush to purchase $50 used laptops [ibooks] turned into a violent stampede Tuesday, with people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over. One woman went so far to wet herself rather than surrender her place in line.
That quote was from a CNN article. And another:
“This is total, total chaos,” said Latoya Jones, 19, who lost one of her flip-flops in the ordeal and later limped around on the sizzling blacktop with one foot bare.
All this happened in Henrico County. Oh the humanity!!!
Here are some more links.
Update: Oh, jeez! We were slashdotted.
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