'The first thing you learn when you have bed bugs is that they provoke even people with heaps of serotonin coursing through their bodies to lose their minds.'
“If you, like me, find yourself crying on your floor in the middle of the night coming to terms with the grossest, more invasive thing you can imagine while furiously Yelping for answers- here is your sign. These are your people!”
The second thing you learn is that treating bed bugs requires hiring two levels of expert. There’s the bed bug inspector, whose sole job is to determine whether or not you have bed bugs and where they might be hiding. Then there’s the fixer, who does the treatments. Both are wildly expensive, but we found ourselves spending money like gamblers on tilt. Price mattered, but our precarious sanity mattered more.
Next came the fixers—bed bug specialists/therapists—who treated the space. First, they explained, we’d need to get our apartment ready. They handed over a prep list longer than our wedding to-do list. Every clothing drawer had to be emptied and then the drawers removed from the dressers. Then all of our clothing, bedding, blankets, pillows, coats, hats, gloves, rags, dishcloths, the kids’ stuffed animals, and any other cloth belonging had to be put in the dryer on high heat for 30 minutes.
When the dryer was replaced, the repairman didn’t reattach the water line properly and the washer water tsunami’d across our dining room, turning our 19th-century walnut floor with its rare and special slat design into buckled wooden waves. Our sink faucet broke and our fridge went on the fritz. Then our upstairs neighbors’ drain flooded and ruined our recently renovated bathroom ceiling. I was struck during this death march by how little our kids complained.
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