The Very Personal Tale of a Truly Horrifying Bedbug Infestation

As bedbugs spread across New York City, one Brooklyn apartment dweller recounts the battle he fought (and lost) against these nasty, relentless critters.


It started with an apartment.
In 2008, I moved into an apartment in Brooklyn with two of my friends from college. We were all 24 at the time and, together, had miraculously amassed enough stuff to fill an apartment -- furniture, a flat screen TV, a Nintendo Wii, an Xbox. We were living the lives our inner 15-year-olds had always wanted. It was a really great time in my life. In fact, up until that point, I had been pretty fortunate. And it is because of that good fortune that I can say the following with absolute certainty: Getting bed bugs is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

Just the process leading up to figuring out that I had bedbugs was agonizing. My roommates and I had been in the apartment for about six months without incident. Then one summer morning, I woke up with a bug bite. It was a deep magenta-colored bug bite that seemed to itch a great deal more than most, but I assumed it was from a mosquito. Then about a week later I woke up with four more insanely-itchy bites. I began to suspect I might have bedbugs.

I brought it up to my roommates, but neither of them had been bitten. We also hadn't moved any new furniture into the apartment or done any of the things that normally bring in bedbugs. They were unconvinced. Over the next week, I got more bites. I said, "Guys, I really think we have bedbugs!" They still did not believe me. To their credit, their dismissiveness was not, in fact, naïve denial. But to explain that, I'm going to have to give you a little backstory.

A few months earlier, I slept with a stranger.
So, I started to do that thing you do after sleeping with a stranger -- freak out about your reproductive health when you see something even remotely abnormal. And I had found something abnormal. It was a bump. And in my brain, "bump" translated to "herpes." The bump was technically only on my upper thigh, but nevertheless it was enough for my herpes freakout to carry on full-speed ahead. In a panic, I made an emergency doctor's appointment with a female physician that I had never met. I arrived at the clinic and showed her my bump. She responded in the single most comforting way I have ever been condescended to. "Honey, that's an ingrown hair." I was healthy and herpes-less.

So, when I said to my roommates, "Guys, I really think we have bed bugs," they came back with, "Yeah...you also just thought you had herpes!" Their skepticism was well placed. I am nuts.

In the course of the next month, I kept getting more bites and my roommates continued to insist I was a lunatic. I was in a constant state of full body itch, but I could not convince anyone of what I was increasingly more sure of -- there were bedbugs not only in my room, but in the whole apartment. I tried sleeping on the couch in the living room and then showing my roommates the bites I got from that, but it was to no avail. They, after all, weren't getting bitten. What I would later find out is that bedbugs simply tend to bite some, and not others. And for those who do get bitten, they sometimes don't have significant reactions to those bites. My two roommates had apparently fallen into one of those categories. At the time, though, I did not have the proper knowledge at my disposal to make a case.

And then I found evidence.
This whole time, I had been searching for bedbugs all over the apartment, but I couldn't find any. I was starting to doubt myself. Maybe I just had hives. But then finally I found one. I was in bed. I had taken to sleeping with the lights on -- and I saw him crawling up the wall. This is when I first learned the most terrifying things about bedbugs. They do not die. I smashed the bug against the wall with my thumb. When I released he kept walking. I scooped him off the wall with a piece of paper, put him on my desk and pounded him repeatedly with a book. He still wasn't dead. I wrapped him in plastic wrap, stomped on him with my foot and then put a shot glass over him. The next morning he was still moving. I showed him to my roommates. I now had proof, at least.

For over a month I had been in a constant state of panic, anticipating the next round of bites. It was actually a relief to finally know what was going on for sure and to be able to convince everyone that I wasn't completely insane. That relief, however, was short lived.

We began a three week extermination process.
All of our clothes had to be washed, dried on high heat and put into sealed garbage bags. I took the extra step of washing all my clothes in commercial grade antiseptic. All of our furniture had to be moved two feet from the walls. All of our drapes, pictures, and posters had to be taken down. Then, once a week for three weeks, our entire apartment was sprayed and covered in a thick layer of white insecticidal powder. And while we were told we were allowed to vacuum it up each time after three days, we thought it best to just leave it there -- really make sure those bugs were dead. We were also told that we could actually live in the apartment during the whole ordeal, but it seemed unwise to try to sleep in a place steeped in poison. My roommates started staying at their girlfriends' places. I had fallen out of touch with the aforementioned stranger girl, so I had to stay with my friend, Joe.

That was a tough sell, by the way. "Hey Joe, my apartment is infested with bugs that ruin your life. They can live in just about anything and are notorious for spreading rapidly. Mind if I bring over a bag of clothes that were just in that apartment and stay at your place?" I convinced Joe I would take extraordinary precautions to somehow not spread the bedbugs, and he was nice enough to lend me a spot on his couch. It was scary for him, though. "Can I get bedbugs from you if we drink out of the same glass? What if we accidentally touch?" He had to watch me obsessively scratch the multitude of remaining bites for three weeks while he wondered, "What if it happens to me?"

Finally, the three weeks were up. My roommates and I returned to our apartment and vacuumed up the layer of powder that coated every horizontal surface. My two-month long panic attack was at an end. Or so I thought.

Two weeks later, I woke up with another bite.
As I said, they don't die. I completely lost my mind. I threw away my bed, my dresser, my night stand, my desk, my posters, my chair, most of my clothes, pictures of my family, and even my TV. Not that I could afford to replace those things -- I certainly couldn't -- but I just couldn't bear to keep them. Logically, I knew that there was no way the bedbugs had somehow infested my family gallery or TV, but I knew I was leaving that apartment forever, and I couldn't stand even the embryo of a thought that I might bring them to a new place. I took my remaining clothes to a laundromat, bought new garbage bags, and made plans to go back to Joe's. By the time I got to his apartment, the only things I owned were two garbage bags full of laundry that smelled like Listerine, a laptop, an iPod, and one final deep magenta bite on my leg that I couldn't stop staring at.

My roommates and I broke our lease and split up to find new apartments. Not wanting to further impose on Joe for the duration of a lengthy New York City apartment search, I took to sleeping at a different friend's place every few nights. I carried my two garbage bags of clothes from one place to another.

Then, one Monday I had a day off from work. I really had no place to go, but I didn't want to ask the friend who's place I was staying at to just hang around in his apartment alone all day. I was going to be staying at a different place that night, so I picked up my laptop, iPod and two bags of clothes and I started walking aimlessly around Brooklyn. By this point, I was so depressed that I had pretty much given up on maintaining any level of respectable personal appearance. I was wearing a ripped tie-dye shirt and a swimsuit. I looked homeless, and in fact, I was.

I made my way to a park and found a nice patch of grass to lay down to take a nap on. Just as I was about to doze off I heard someone yell my name. My eyes bolted open. Standing over me was a girl I had known in college. I hadn't seen her in three years.

"Noah? What...are you doing?"

There was no efficient way to explain why I was sleeping in a park in the middle of the day on a Monday, surrounded by garbage bags. I decided I'd start at the beginning. "Well," I said, "A few months ago I thought I had herpes..."

Noah spent six months trying the patience of college friends, crashing at their apartment, until he found a new apartment in Brooklyn. He's been living there bedbug free ever since. He tries to keep sane during the current bedbug outbreak sweeping New York City. About a month ago, he found what turned out to be a mosquito bite. His roommate had to talk him out of moving. Noah still refuses to sit on subway benches or walk on the same side of the street as a discarded mattress. He has yet to replace all of his belongings. More than anything, he just wants his corduroy blazer back, but realizes the potential karmic repercussions of reenacting any part of of his pre-bedbug life.

Still thinking about bedbugs? (We're sorry!) Check out these great pieces from our friends...
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and more about bedbugs from AOL Health!

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