“Don’t let the bed bugs bite.” Everyone has heard the expression, and for most of my life, I thought it was a harmless way to wish someone a good night’s sleep. Well, 2 years ago, I got to experience those words literally.

Around a year before I got the first-hand experience, my apartment building manager came to my door one day with another guy, and said they were looking for bed bugs. They came in and checked my bed, lifting up the mattress to take a look, but didn’t find anything. I was confident there wouldn’t be anything there, though, since I’ve never experienced getting bitten, and thought my place was pretty clean.

Time passed, and around a year later, my girlfriend started to complain about being itchy on her arms and feet, and she showed me some red dots on her arm, usually two or three in one place. I just thought that maybe she was having an allergic reaction to something. After all, I didn’t have any marks on my body and didn’t feel anything.

Not long after that, I saw one. I used to get up pretty early in the morning to start using the Internet, usually right before sunrise. I was sitting, clicking my mouse and typing, and I saw something on my desk, pretty big and dark colored. I had a pile of photo envelopes, and it came out for a second and then went back under it. I lifted up the envelopes and saw it. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it might just be a harmless beetle of some kind, but I ended up having to crush it because I couldn’t catch it.

That got me thinking about my girlfriend’s bites, and also something else. I remembered seeing a small red bug on my hand a few days before that. It crawled on my hand while I was using my mouse. I just thought it was a cute little bug. It was around the size of a period (.). When I pushed my thumb against it, it exploded in a big smudge of blood. I remembered thinking, how could such a small thing have so much blood (now I know the blood came from me!)?

That was enough to prompt an investigation. I started to do some research about bed bugs. Actually, I didn’t really have any knowledge of them before that time, but it was easy to find information about them on the Internet. I read through the signs to look for:

  • Bite marks on your body, sometimes a few in a row as they get disturbed by their sleeping host’s movements sometimes while they are feeding.
  • Seeing dark spots on your bed sheets and around other places bed bugs have been — that is actually bed bug feces.

Well, my girlfriend seemed to have bites, and there were a few small black stains on the bed sheets. Could it really be that we have bed bugs? I asked myself. I still wasn’t sure. I only saw the one big one, the one baby one, and my girlfriend’s apparent bites.

Adult bed bug. Not a pretty site, especially when it's sucking your blood.

Adult bed bug. Not a pretty site, especially when it's sucking your blood.

A few days later, I was on my chair again, and I put my knees up on the chair. When I did that, I felt something between my inner thigh and ankle (something tickling my ankle). When I checked my ankle, there was another red bug on it, but this one was bigger, perhaps the size of a sesame seed. I let him crawl on my hand and went to show my girlfriend. “Look what was on my ankle. I think maybe we do have something in here.” And we went out into the living room, and when we looked at my chair, we saw two baby white ones crawling on it. How did they get up on the chair? I thought. My chair was a pretty high quality office chair made of upholstery. I checked inside the folds, checked the back, and didn’t really see anything, but I gave it a good spraying with raid. (I soon after realized that the raid I was using was useless against bed bugs).

Then we went into the bedroom and checked the bed, but didn’t see anything. I took off the sheets, lifted the mattresses,  stood the mattresses up on their ends so it was just the bed frame, but we couldn’t see anything.

A few days later, my girlfriend caught one biting her while she was sleeping. We had been keeping a small pen light with a bright blue-colored beam near the bed after we became suspicious. She said she felt something biting her hand first, and then something biting her foot (the parts that weren’t under the blanket), so she turned on the light and was able to get it. Then I remembered hearing something about the time of the night bedbugs usually come out to feed. Most of the sources I came across said they usually feed an hour or two before sunrise. It was now close to that time, so I thought I would go out to my living room to investigate.

I was quiet, walking softly, and carrying the same little flashlight. I came to the corner that led into the living room, and slowly peeked around to see the wall. That is where my computer desk was, around one meter from the corner, and there is a baseboard there. I shined the light along the baseboard behind my computer desk, and that was when I got one of my biggest shocks since moving into this place. There were so many bugs there! Some were just standing there, and others looked like they were going on a leisurely stroll along the baseboard and wall above there. These were big, full size bed bugs, and probably around 20 of them. I kept sneaking around to the front of my computer desk. I saw an adult bed bug on my computer chair, just sitting there, probably waiting for it’s meal (me) to come to it like I guess I had been doing quite a lot without realizing it. My computer was sitting on the floor against the side of my computer desk. I quickly moved it away from the side of the desk, and I saw one adult bug and several babies running away. They had been hiding in the dark space between my computer and the side of the desk. Is this real or a nightmare, I remember thinking.

The space behind my computer desk where most of my bed bugs were

Well, that was the last straw! I went to get the new bottle of raid I had purchased recently — one that said it could kill bedbugs — and started the chemical attack. I unleashed a ton of it against the side of the wall, especially into the crack between the wall and baseboard, which can serve as a bedbug superhighway. I sprayed tons of it on my chair, under my desk, and all areas around my computer desk.

When I thought I had finally sprayed enough, I went back to bed. My girlfriend woke up a bit, and I told her that I saw something that she’s not going to believe. I started to tell her how many bed bugs I saw. All of a sudden, I felt something picking into the bottom of my toe like a burning needle (a bit like a mosquito bite), and I hit the bottom of my feet a dozen times. One of them must have crawled between my toes or something while I was walking slowly looking for them earlier. For the rest of the night, my girlfriend and I could barely sleep, wondering if there might be bugs crawling under the sheets with us.

The next day, I got up and checked the damage from my spraying, but didn’t see too much. Did I get any of them? I checked my chair again, but this time I checked under it and found a fold in the upholstery that I had never checked before. It was on the opposite side from the window where it would always be quite dark in there. I turned it around so I could get some light into the opening, and got yet another surprise. There were many sesame seed size bed bugs in there sticking against the side. Okay, time to say goodbye to my favorite computer chair, I thought; and I picked it up, carried it outside, and tossed the whole chair into the trash bin.

Right after that, I decided to call the apartment manager to report that I had bed bugs, and he told me that an exterminator would be there within the next day to try to get rid of my bed bug problem. By law, the building is responsible for getting rid of a tenant’s infestation problems. So we just decided to wait for the experts to arrive, and hopefully our problem would be taken care of.

My dead bed bug collection: useful in proving you have a problem

I apologize for the length of this post, but I wanted to describe my experience in as much detail as possible so that it might be of benefit to others who might be having somewhat similar experiences and suspicions. Be sure to check out part 2, where I explain a bit more about bed bugs, and about the signs to look for in determining if you might have a bed bug infestation.