going buggy

This summer, my husband and I had an opportunity to meet and get to know bedbugs. Additionally, right before i moved to my new apartment, they decided that they liked me and moved into my furnishings and/or clothing. For a while, I woke up morning after morning with a whole collection of new welts on my body (at the peak, over 40). I was starting to look like I had the chicken pox again. Since the exterminator would cost about $1200, I decided to take it into my own hands. I obsessed over every piece of information I could find about them and searched for ways I could get rid of them. They are hard to kill and find. After four days of taking apart and spraying all the wooden furniture in my bedroom, sterilizing all washable clothing, wrapping all nonwashables in black plastic to be baked in the sun and hermetically sealed everything I owned, I thought I was done. I moved, and tentatively unpacked- hoping that the buggers were gone. Okay, so that was at the beginning of Septemeber. During September, every two or three days, I would notice a red welt or two pop up but they would not stay long (the old ones lasted at least a week). I stopped obsessing with the hope that the population was small enough (N=1) that they would not be able to reproduce effective and start a colony. Eventually, those bites seemed to stop too. Heartened by this, two weeks ago I opened my last hermetically sealed boxes and fully unpacked.

Bad news, the occassional bites are back. I can feel the obsession coming on as I sit scratching and typing. My only hope is that their frequency does not increase.