“Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite!” my parents would cheerfully tell me every night.
I don’t understand why they were so happy. I’ll never joke about bed bugs again.I declared war against bed bugs a couple of weeks ago. It started with a mysterious line of bug bites, then escalated into itchy, paranoid misery.
It’s disgusting. But it’s also not my fault. Bed bugs can come from a variety of sources, like a suitcase left on the floor of a hotel or a piece of used furniture. Even a neighbor you never come in contact with other than sharing a wall can give them to you.
I’m writing this from a hotel room. If you can afford it (thanks, Mom!), this is a great option while trying to rid yourself of the bugs — just be vigilant not to bring any with you. It’s hard enough to sleep thinking about that midterm in the morning without knowing bed bugs are going to anesthetize you and suck your blood for ten-minute intervals during the night.
As I was at Target buying hotel food, a college-aged man was at the register next to me.
“I can’t sleep," he told the cashier with crazy eyes. "I wake up and feel like things are crawling all over me."
I tried to give him a sympathetic look, because while bed bugs infest your apartment, they also take up residence in your mind. Within a week, it got to a point where I was sleeping on top of blankets in the middle of my living room floor surrounded by a tape barricade. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and freak out because my blanket crossed the tape, making a potential bridge for invaders — and this seemed completely normal to me.
I saw bed bug potential everywhere: in lecture halls, on the light rail, in movie theaters. I was getting into Howard Hughes obsessive-compulsive disorder territory. The only positive result of my paranoia was that I devoted myself to making sure I didn’t spread them, quarantining my home life from my public life by changing clothes immediately when I left or returned and heating clothes and bagging them.
Then I realized many people wouldn’t be willing to put in this degree of effort to ensure they were rid of the bugs. That’s when the fear really set in.
While it’s easy to get bed bugs, it’s not easy to get rid of them — the main thing I can recommend is informing your landlord (or community assistant if you're in a residential hall) immediately and getting professional pest control in addition to taking things into your own hands. I ended up throwing away much of my clothes as well as some smaller furniture (donating any of it was too risky).
One good thing about the Arizona heat is that sustained temperatures over 120 degrees kill bed bugs. Putting things in black trash bags in my car for a few days and parking it in direct sun could have killed the bugs in all of their life stages. The dryer also will work, though it gets expensive for a college student to feed quarters into a laundromat to heat everything you own. Sustained cold temperatures can work too, but it’s trickier because many freezers don’t consistently stay under 32 degrees.
Vacuuming constantly and immediately sealing and disposing the bags is one of the only other do-it-yourself options. Bed bugs can live for long periods of time without feeding, so they’re tenacious. You can’t retreat from battle.
A cheap weapon for college students is diatomaceous earth. Made from the crushed fossils of algae, it dehydrates bed bugs (as well as cockroaches and other disgusting hard-shelled insects) and kills them. As a bonus, you can know it’s a painful death.
DE is around $12 for a four-pound bag at the Home Depot. I sprinkled it around much of my apartment (it’s not toxic to people, but I was still cautious about breathing it in and using it near food) and I’m hoping it works.
Really, really hoping. Cross your fingers for me.
Contact the reporter at smwester@asu.edu.
