Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don't let the Bedbugs bite!

What does this:

And this:

Have in common?

I hate them both.

HATE them.

There are some who never use the HATE word—I use it sparingly myself.

When it comes to pickles and me, the word is appropriate. I tell people I am allergic to pickles—they make me break out in vomit. The smell nauseates me and they are banned from my house. If my children must have a pickle, they travel to a distance not less than six blocks from me and beg them, door-to-door.

I have found nothing I hate more than pickles—except maybe pickle relish. The smell of a hot dog loaded with mustard, ketchup, and pickle relish is worse than an outhouse at a chili cook-off on the 4th of July.

Something now tops my HATE list—bedbugs.

Several seemingly unrelated issues have occurred over the past few weeks. I developed an itchy rash on my left shoulder that traveled down my arm on to my hands. In addition to the red splotches I started breaking out in hives, daily on both hands and arms.

I thought the abscess under tooth #18 had caused some reaction run amok, but after a thorough examination by my dentist, Dr. Extraction, it was only three abscesses and a vertical fracture on the root causing the radiating jaw pain.

Next came the blood marks on the sheets—TMI, you say? They were odd streaks, like someone digging at their hives in the night, only I didn’t have any scabs to show for it. (Maybe you should skip that paragraph you just read if you have a weak stomach.)

Then—the weird black marks surrounding the outline of my head on my pillows and sheets. Like a bizarre police-chalk outline of a body, my upper torso imprint was a stark white contrast surrounded by black specks. My husband had a not-quite-as-vivid imprint on his side of the bed.

We blamed our new, twin CPAP machines (blog and photos to follow at a later date). A couple of nights ago, we spent our twilight hours in a not-so-romantic game of examining the shiny silver boxes with attached hoses for black-speck-spewage. When we tired of that pastime, we checked each others’ ankles and calves for scabs to explain the new blood streaks across the bottom of the bed.

The bloodstains seemingly came from nowhere.

I covered my face with a tissue as I slept, hoping to catch some black ash as evidence. I blew off the tissue in the night, but “LO!” when I dug the tissue clump from the floor beside my bed I had an epiphany!

Here is a picture of the epiphany:

Ugly, isn’t it? Let me describe it to you: a mass of bed bugs scurrying in their own defecation to hide in the seams of my once-lovely pillow-top mattress after glutting themselves on my tasty blood.

The hives and rash on my arms: Allergic reaction to the myriad bed-bug bites on my upper torso

The black specks surrounding my head: Bed-bug poop trails

The red blood streaks on the sheets: Spots where we rolled over the little blood-engorged creatures as we slept.

Eeeeew!!!! Do you itch all over? I do!

So if you hate pickles, like I hate pickles (or something equally disgusting to you)

Remember…

Bedbugs are worse!!!

Aren’t you glad I shared this?

Have a great day!