There have been more than a few PPs about the mental torture of bastard bed bugs…@Fleetbugamongst others .. and fleas…@Muffinmamand I’m happy to say I’ve dodged both thus far ( 🤞🙏 don’t mean to tempt fate before I fly next week 🙄🤷♀️👿!).
So, all the warnings of chucking your luggage! Your clothes! Walking into house naked ( and being butt (!) of your neighbours Ring doorbells!) and the rest could look like a tad of an overreaction ….. BUT!! I swear to God, if they are ANYTHING like the sheer living HELL of SCABIES, then PLEASE PAY ATTENTION to their warnings!!
If you are imagining bites, the pain, itching, the mental stress of where the bastard are coming from, then when the little cheeky fuckers are LIVING INSIDE YOUR BODY, and you can literally watch their direction change daily?! It literally almost drove me mentally insane ( and I don’t say that lightly, with family mental health issues). The scares thing is.., it took months, MONTHS!!! To find out WTF was going on with me!! The rashes on my arms ( nothing at all on my hands!!), round my back by my bra strap, but mainly my arms, the itching, the relentless, relentless ITCHING!! Zero Sleep! Maybe 10-15 minute then wake, and scratch yourself till you bleed again, then repeat! GP, I thought! Great! Ah, ok, “ just eczema ”. Ok. No…. Month later till another GP, “ hest rash” Antisan! Antihistamines! Ok. No, the agony, sounds even like i am exaggerating to myself, but it is constant! Constant! Itching. The feeling you have lost your mind as everyone around you is carrying on like normal ( thankfully!), but going about their day, at work, shops, they are acting like normal people, where all you want to do is strip off and SCRATCH! I remember about 21/2 months in after seeing yet another GP, I was talking my DS to a hospital appointment in a new town, it was roasting hot summer day, we’d got lost, had stopped to ask directions, and whilst a lovely couple were helping us, I had to shimmy inside my top to shimmy my bra off as the back strap was pure torture- and just shove my hand up my back and scratch scratch scratch…. Then it was two weeks in Greece in August - that was fun- spent a fortune in hotel clinic on potent Greek lotions and god- knows- what injections in my butt for my “ urticaria”… Oh, how much worse it was in hot weather! I was having hour or so sleep in stages… if one of my DS jumped on the bed, a stray grain of sand would mean a night of no sleep at all… relentless feeling of being utterly crazy as not knowing what it was!!!
Anyway… please bear with me… I’m trying to add to the bed bugs warning!…… getting on for FOUR months with this madness inducing moving itchy AF rash you could track, I took my DS to GP. Thank God it was with the Senior Partner. Not great with children and esp not with AudADHD like my DS. When we were leaving, I said, “ I know I don’t have an appointment and shouldn’t ask, but I’ve had this rash for months and I can’t sleep at all, all I do is itch and I genuinely think I’ve lost my tiny mind”… he asked me to show him, so I lifted the back of my top up….. he looked very seriously for zero seconds, glanced at DS and gravely said “You have Sarcoptes Scabiei”. It didn’t tide the Latin I didn’t do to go “ SCABIES?!?!” … and, as he started to calm me down, I just cried sobs of sheer RELIEF that I wasn’t losing my mind!! Something WAS not right! And, it was the tens of thousands of CF feeding off my insides!!! Taking my blood! My energy! And my mind!!
I collected my Strong AF potions, to go home to ditch my bedding, clothes, scrub myself and plaster the shit all over me to leave on for 24 hours, to kill the CF! Oh, and then, to REPEAT in 7 days!!!! Cause they won’t all be dead! But, I cried and cried with happiness ALL the way home in sheer joy!! First time I’d laughed in months!!
So! If bastard bed bugs are like scabies, please do ANYTHING to avoid bring them home! PP are NOT over exaggerating!! I genuinely genuinely became unhinged, esp as working on less than a couple hours sleep of tossing and turning every few minutes sleep.
So, @Fleetbug.. your “ it was the picture frame….. probably shouting gotcha!”… !! I knew what you meant!!!!! 🤩🤩🤩