Bed bugs excrete all over vanilla lifestyle

By Barry Link

Many people in Vancouver were celebrating nature this past Earth Day weekend. I was trying to kill it.

Two weeks ago Sunday night, I went to bed, looking forward to a good night's sleep for the work week ahead. Turning off the lights in the rest of my home, I entered my bedroom, patted the cat sleeping on the corner of the bed, pulled back the covers and discovered a red-brown, lentil-sized monster crawling across the sheets.

It was a bedbug, waiting patiently to have me for dinner.

I quickly trapped it in an empty plastic container and went online to verify its identity. I was hoping against hope it would turn out to be something harmless or benign, like a garden beetle or a newly evolved, tan-coloured ladybug. But there online was my little monster, reproduced in full photographic glory on the first Wikipedia entry I came to.

That it was there, as were the dozen or so I've come across since, has been a huge, jagged concept to wrap my head around. I don't know how they got into my home. I don't know how long they've been there. No one I know has them. My neighbours deny any similar problems. I haven't been abroad or slept in a hotel room-two common ways to pick up bedbugs-in more than a year. I've yet to hang out in a crack den.

We all know bedbugs are a growing insect insurgency in Vancouver. (They're on the rebound everywhere in North America a half century after they effectively disappeared from the continent.) But you never think it's going to happen to you. I live a painfully vanilla lifestyle in a nice building with quiet neighbours in a modest, clean community. In my bed, it's now Main and Hastings.

Trust me that you don't want them. Essentially tiny vampires, they hide during the day in cracks in the wall, under baseboards, in the crevices of your bed frame and in the seams of your mattress. They will even hang out behind electrical plates and inside radios and phones next to your bed. They come out at night (usually), when you're asleep (but not always), drawn by your warmth and the carbon dioxide you exhale in your breath. They crawl on to you, find a patch of skin and stick two hollow tubes into you. One tube contains its spit, which prevents your blood from clotting and numbs the pain of the bite. The other tube is the straw for your blood.

In an evolutionary sense, they're marvels: tough and canny, they can survive for months without feeding. They prey on you when you're at your most vulnerable and passive and treat your body like a bottomless hemoglobin milkshake.

I've endured maybe two dozen bites since I first discovered the problem. But I suspect there are more. They range from a barely noticeable incision in the skin to an annoying itch on the scale of a mosquito bite. Other people, judging from what I've read, react much more severely to the bites. I guess I'm lucky, despite the itch I'm feeling now on selected parts of my back, leg and arm.

But I'm not sure if all or any of the itching is related to a real bite. The paranoia is what gets you. It's no fun when your bed is a buffet table and you're the buffet, and it's distinctly creepy to wake up in the morning and find little brown spots on the sheets where they've fed and-this is gross-excreted. And having bedbugs is like having leprosy. Friends and colleagues have been overwhelmingly sympathetic. They also take a slight step back from you with a look of thank God it's not me. My boss says, jokingly, that with an apartment that's a hot zone, I can say goodbye to dating for the next while. He's not far off. Soon after I discovered the bugs, I was gently de-invited from a party. I understood.

I'm fighting back. This past weekend I called in an exterminator, whose obvious sympathy for my plight was disturbing. Five years ago, he said, bedbug calls were rare in Vancouver. Now they're a major part of his job and in every kind of neighbourhood. He also noted they're hard to get rid of, which is why he'll return in two weeks for a second spray. It won't be soon enough.

That I hired someone to douse my home with chemical to kill God's creatures on Earth Day was not lost on me. If I could convince the bedbugs to go away by holding a benefit concert for endangered rainforests, I would. But I suspect these nasty, little bits of nature would find a reason to stay. They're freeloading off my circulatory system. Life is good. And also, I hope, very, very short.

blink@vancourier.com

published on 04/25/2007