Hello there.
I had bedbugs 10 years ago. Yadda yad!
I'm pretty sure I read a few of these stories already back then, and so have you.
I am amazed and humbled and grateful to find this corner of bedbug land still here. Here for me!
On Memorial Day I was looking for something to watch on TV, clickity click, content, bedbugs not even a memory of a memory, ready to give up and get up, when I felt it crawling down my arm. I put down a finger on it and felt it between my finger and my arm, and there it was, engorged, red. Very red. Impossibly red.
I took it well.
Two minutes later I'm frantically trying to hold it and trying to find and open my loupe with my other hand (my loupe! that Lou gave me all those years ago!) and my eyesight sucks and I know in my heart what I'm holding but I can't see and I can't focus and I'm starting to cry and my SO is trying to see and yelling show me, show me, show me! Don't you dare take it. I need to show it to Lou. Don't be crazy, I would be covered in bites if we had them! LOL dude. Don't you dare! But he dares and he grabs. And he pronounces it a piece of nothing. And he crushes and throws it away.
I'm not sure of the order of the steps I took but I found them. This feels like a cruel joke/miracle. I can't be sure I found all of them, obviously, and I am insanely worried that there are other harborages, and most of all I have this low-level anxiety at the base of my skull because I am not reacting to the bites. And I did not see fecal spots, just them, various stages, and eggs, and blood. And if no fecal spots there, where else? So I vacuumed and vacuumed and steamed and steamed and scrubbed away with a soapy sponge and I think I steamed incorrectly, way too much pressure it seemed. And then I placed one of David's passive monitors, incorrectly too I'm sure. And then I indulged Mr. Nothing to sprinkle turmeric on the mattress. Turmeric. I just. Everything was yellow for a while.
I used to react very badly and had a very bad experience (aren't they all, but really). And now apparently I don't. Or not yet. Perhaps I will again, in a while (days, weeks), with continued bites I presume. Mr. Nothing does not react either. Of course.
Interestingly, I still had to persuade him not to encase. The instinct to encase must be primordial.
I am calmer than I ever thought I would be in this circumstance.
I've spent hours dusting Cimexa with an eyeshadow brush on the tiny threads and tufts and seams of the mattress. Considering next steps. Yes, I've vacuumed the turmeric. I don't even wear eyeshadow but I have eyeshadows and eyeshadow brushes. I am blessed.
Cimexa instead of DE. What else has changed? What else do I don't know that I don't know?
If you read all the way here, I really appreciate you.