Several years ago my wife and I discovered we had bed bugs. We were early twenties and had gotten married only nine months before. I started getting bitten about a month before we discovered the infestation. My wife was never bitten during the course of the infestation. We later learned that this is not uncommon with bed bugs.
Now the relation to the story about Morgellons. Bed bug bites can be extremely itchy and cause large welts on some people (not everyone as it is an allergic reaction). This was true in my case. The welts tended to be about the side of a silver dollar and last for about a week before subsiding.
We had contracted the bed bugs at a house party we had attended where I had gotten a few bites. We assume they were mosquito bites and didn't think another thing about them. About 2 weeks after that I started getting bites while I was sleeping. Never having been exposed to bed bugs I first assumed mosquito bites or perhaps spider bites. Neither of these cases turned out to be true.
After two more weeks I began to feel very crazy for lack of a better word. The itching from the bites was driving me wild and we could not figure out what was biting me. (The infestation was never a large one, most likely it started from a single insect). I went to the student health clinic (we were graduate students at the time). They concluded bug bites but we were not sure because we could not find any bugs!
I made an appointment with a private dermatologist. Now, before I got in to see him we did more research. We did turn up bed bugs as a possibility and we looked but not throughly enough and found nothing. (It turns out they are very very good at hiding). The research turned up all kinds of crazy things like the Morgellons disease and various mite related infestations, such as Bird Mites. Having a bird we became alarmed at that particular possibility as bird mites are tiny and very difficult to get rid of.
The internet research made my psychological condition rapidly deteriorate. I worried constantly about the different possibilities. It effect my ability to do research. It affected my ability to properly TA. I was becoming psychotic in my search for the causing the itching that would not cease.
Finally, I got the private dermatologist. He suggested bed bugs and told us to search again. This time, the infestation had grown and we found them. It was such a relief to know the cause.
However, the cure is neither fast nor simple nor cheap for bed bugs. Insecticides are ineffective as they only eat mammalian blood and the most effect insecticides these days need to be ingested by the organism. The most effect thing is physical removal of the insects, their eggs, and their larva. The eggs and larva are tiny and it takes very careful searching to find and clean them all.
We spent every night for months search with magnifying glasses and powerful flash lights while washing and drying our bedding (heat treatment (or cold) is the only sure fire solution to bed bugs). It took many months but eventually we found them all and with the help the pest man's insecticides prevented the infestation from growing out of control. Needless to say we moved and bought a new bed when our lease was up!
Even today years later, I still fear unexplained itching. It think that for me, I could have developed a psychosis where I believe I am being bitting by invisible bugs if we had not found the infestation. It took a long time for my mental state to recover and if it had gone on for 6, 12 months of unexplained bites and itching I may have become very unstable. Itching is very difficult to deal with.
I hope that someone can help these people find an effective way for them individually to deal with the itching even if for some it is only in their minds.
Sorry to hear about your bug hunt ordeal. I have had a similar bed-bug problem once; albeit on a smaller scale. Catching them turned out to be simple in my case. Hopefully this will be useful to someone:
I used a mosquito net which tied on top of the bed and wrapped around the edges of the mattress. I left the net always wrapped around the mattress even when I was not sleeping-in. I found that the bed-bugs would eventually accumulate at the top of the net. Everyday, a couple of them would be found there and I just had to eliminate those.
After about a month, they had all been trapped and exterminated, and the infestation had died.
Nice tip. Can you elaborate on how you setup the net though? Was it hanging from the ceiling when you say "tied on the top of the bed", forming a tent like structure and the bugs would crawl to the pinnacle? What time of day would you find them and kill them?
I don't accurately remember the time of day that I would find them (it was about a decade back). My vague memory is that it was in the morning, after waking up.
Yes, I found the primary torture of having bedbugs is psychological. The slightest movement on your skin sets you off on a panicked bug hunt when it's really just an errant hair, or maybe a loose thread. Unfortunately, since we are hairy mammals and as the hair on our head tends to fall off all the time, and because hair tends to find its way inside our clothes and stick to our skin, there are hundreds of these sensations every day. The other problem is, hair is fine and we tend not to see it and assume it was just a bug that got away. This quickly makes you paranoid, and soon interferes with your ability to sleep soundly, which soon makes you irritated and eventually starts affecting your work. One of the first things to do when discovering an infestation is to realize this psychological problem and actively deal with it.
As for dealing with the bedbugs themselves, search for "the Missouri Method". It essentially consists of making it impossible for the bugs to reach you as you sleep, which 1) gives you instantaneous relief from bites, 2) avoids having to hunt all their hiding places, and 3) disrupts their lifecycle, which over a period of few weeks, kills them. Keeping them away typically involves the use of plastic or other smooth surfaces where their legs can't get a grip.
Note that the online tutorials go somewhat overboard, in my experience: you don't need airtight seals everywhere. I managed to treat the problem successfully simply by covering my mattresses and bed with a plastic sheet ($10 roll at Home Depot) and running packing tape horizontally along the walls (to keep them from getting onto the ceilings and dropping on to you; yes, they do that). A bed-sheet on top of the plastic sheeting provides little comfort, and the crackling of the plastic is really annoying, but the peace of mind knowing that bugs can't get to you will give you the best sleep you've had in weeks.
“It turns out my psyche has been irrevocably warped by this experience. I'd call it PTSD, but that insults everyone who has experienced worse shit than mere bedbugs. Instead, I'll draw on my years of psychological training (seriously) to bullshit a new name: PBI, or post-bedbug insanity.”
This is an excellent non-crinkly mattress encasement. I use it all the time, with pillow encasements too. Using these encasements and washing all of my bedding with hot water every week cured my mite allergy symptoms.
My girlfriend dealt with bed bugs once with a "steamer" she bought off craigslist. It's kind of like an iron, basically it blows steam. She steamed the whole room, carpet, bed, sheets, pillows. Apparently the temperature kills them. It worked... they disappeared. No chemicals.
I found a bug on me one morning upon awakening and became convinced I had bed bugs. After some googling, I built a cheap bed bug detector out of sugar solution and yeast, which produced a steady stream of CO2 for several days. Bed bugs are attracted to the CO2 we emit, and the detector lures them in, and then they drop into some soapy water for collection. After a few nights of nothing in the trap, I went back to the bug I had found that morning. I had wrapped it with a tissue and thrown it in a jar. On careful examination, it was not the right shape for a bedbug.
Several years ago I woke up with a big welt on my back, about the size of a quarter and quite tall. It didn't hurt, but it was a strange shape: hard, white, conical, with a red dot in the middle.
The next few days I woke up with itchy bumps on my skin. I thought they were mosquito bites. I became obsessive about keeping the windows closed.
Through the next few months it got worse. Huge swaths of them would appear across my arms and legs. But when I went to show them to someone, they would be gone! I discovered that they could come and go within a matter of hours.
At its worst, it would look like I was mauled by a tiger. The mosquito bites would take winding paths down my legs, following veins and arteries in spidering patterns almost like red claw marks.
I went to a doctor, and they sent me to an allergy specialist. They gave me an allergy panel, but only the pure histamine gave the bumpy itchy response. The diagnosis: chronic idiopathic urticaria. No cure. Just hope it stops happening eventually. Give it two years.
Well, it took two years to go away, but it's gone now, I think. It shows up again sometimes though, randomly, especially when I'm stressed. The worst part is that it makes it harder to notice when I have other reasons to be itchy, which I've had many: pinworms, lice, jock itch.
Fortunately no bed bugs though! That was one of our fears during this whole thing.
That's not a diagnosis; that's a lack of diagnosis. "Chronic urticaria" is the symptom you reported; "idiopathic" means "we have no idea what is causing this."
1) Throw away the bed.
2) Incinerate them; which is really hard, as you have to make sure you got all
their hidding places and left no prisoners. On top of it, that method can't
take place inside the house.
A friend of mine had a case of bed bugs and throwing away the bed didn't work, only hot steaming the whole house. The exterminators (is that the word? the guys who get rid of infestations) found bugs hiding in the baseboards around the house.
For my infestation, no way was I going to toss an otherwise nice expensive mattress. Took only about half an hour with a shop vac to inspect every inch of the mattress and dispose of all bugs. Or at least I wasn't bitten again.
From first hand experience I can tell you this might not work because sometimes (as it was in my case) the bedbugs hide far away from the bed, then do their daily pilgrimage at night onto your bed.
There's another way, that doesn't require heat or cold, which worked for me when we ended up with bed-bugs.
Wrap everything that could be infected in polyethylene sheeting - and include a few sachets of ascorbic acid in there - you can get it online or from a pharmacy typically. Make it air-tight - like, really, really air-tight. Cling-film around the plastic sheeting can make an extra barrier.
Leave it for a few months. When you unwrap, you'll end up with soft pitter-patter of little asphyxiated carcasses, and your infestation is over.
I had a small bedbug problem once. I created a perimeter around my room and bed with diatomaceous earth for a few weeks. Since my bed had legs, it was easy, I could just put the legs in bowls with the stuff. I never saw them again.
When we come back from a high risk country/hotel, we use the same treatment around the bed legs as a preventive measure. We also put the stuff in the luggage for a few days before opening them.
The good thing about this stuff is, it's inert, also it's super cheap. It kills them mechanically and it's safe for us humans, unless you snort the whole bottle. That means you can use the powder directly on your mattress if they infested the bed directly.
However, this also mean they won't die immediately, so they can bite you once before dying. Also, you don't find the corpses easily.
They don't "believe" they are ill. They actually are ill, just not from a parasite infection. The itch is real and causes distress.
There is an ethical problem in offering lab tests to people when you know that most of them do not have parasite infestations. And it doesn't matter what the results are - they will only serve to strengthen the delusion. A negative result will just be interpreted as "science doesn't know how to test these fibres".
We see this very clearly in people with "health anxiety". Imagine a fit and healthy young man who walks into an ER department and says that he's having a heart attack. Traditionally some doctors would have steapped that man to a bunch of machines and talked anout the results, and then said "see? You're not having a heart attack." This attempt at reassurance is distorted hy the mental health problem into "they wouldn't use all these machines and order these blood tests if there was nothing wrong".
The modern method would be to let the person sit with their thoughts for a few moments - "yes, you might be having a heart attack"; to examine the evidence for that and how strongly they feel it ("I am out of breath and my chest feels a bit tight and I'm a bit dizzy"); then to examine other stuff ("I don't have any pain, now that I have been carefully breathing I don't feel as bad. I know that I have an anxiety disorder that can cause me to panic. Maybe this is not a heart attack but a panic attack.")
This sounds trivial but it is strongly effective for a variety of mental health problems.
The problem here being that people who become ill from a real parasite infection are the most likely people to acquire a delusion that exaggerates and extends their symptomatic distress; The feeling of 'formication' is both caused by insects crawling on the skin, and caused psychogenically by the self-reinforcing expectation that insects are crawling on the skin, an expectation that is entirely rational in anyone who has been subject to an infestation. Detecting parasite infection is non-trivial and error-prone.
A family member has enduring beliefs and anxiety about head lice, which drove them to psychosis for a period of six months, causing all sorts of little false beliefs and reactive rituals that persist several years later as a sort of PTSD. The fact that they quite likely had lice at one point that triggered this whole thing, is no longer provable, but if examined without this case history, we would dismiss it as some kind of waste of physician time. It is very hard to convincingly reassure a patient that they 'no longer' have an infestation that they once had, but are still feeling the symptoms of.
The modern method seems a bit irresponsible to me.
It puts the burden on the patient to prove his claim leaving the doctor only well prepared for the most standard of cases.
I just makes me wonder how many people died of real heart attacks because the doctor felt the need to 'leave them with their thoughts' in a time where every second could make the difference between life and death.
I don't doubt there are people that confuse heart attacks with panic attacks and people who are perfectly fine but feign illness in a desperate attempt to seek attention.
There are all kinds of people however that still doesn't justify ignoring people.
You should be doing anything and everything possible to determine if he is really having a heart attack as he claims and once you determine there is no danger with 99.9% certainty and all the tools at your disposal you can ignore him.
This psychoanalysis and profiling bullshit is the last thing you should have to deal with when you honestly believe your life is in danger.
It's not ignoring them, it's providing a more useful and very cheap diagnostic test to handle the likely case where the patient is suffering from something which can respond better to time and patience than poking and prodding.
If the patient was old, morbidly obese, had a history of heart attacks, was scratching at an tingly left arm, or something like this, I'm sure the doc would go ahead with the other tests.
If the patient is young (as stated in the hypothetical) and otherwise in good shape, giving them a second to baseline is completely reasonable and better for them.
It's really easy to tell the differnece between someone having a heart attack and someone having a panic attack.
> There are all kinds of people however that still doesn't justify ignoring people.
You are not ignoring them. You are avoiding unnecessary and potentially harmful diagnostics and treatments, and providing effective appropriate treatment. You are improving the quality of care.
Now the relation to the story about Morgellons. Bed bug bites can be extremely itchy and cause large welts on some people (not everyone as it is an allergic reaction). This was true in my case. The welts tended to be about the side of a silver dollar and last for about a week before subsiding.
We had contracted the bed bugs at a house party we had attended where I had gotten a few bites. We assume they were mosquito bites and didn't think another thing about them. About 2 weeks after that I started getting bites while I was sleeping. Never having been exposed to bed bugs I first assumed mosquito bites or perhaps spider bites. Neither of these cases turned out to be true.
After two more weeks I began to feel very crazy for lack of a better word. The itching from the bites was driving me wild and we could not figure out what was biting me. (The infestation was never a large one, most likely it started from a single insect). I went to the student health clinic (we were graduate students at the time). They concluded bug bites but we were not sure because we could not find any bugs!
I made an appointment with a private dermatologist. Now, before I got in to see him we did more research. We did turn up bed bugs as a possibility and we looked but not throughly enough and found nothing. (It turns out they are very very good at hiding). The research turned up all kinds of crazy things like the Morgellons disease and various mite related infestations, such as Bird Mites. Having a bird we became alarmed at that particular possibility as bird mites are tiny and very difficult to get rid of.
The internet research made my psychological condition rapidly deteriorate. I worried constantly about the different possibilities. It effect my ability to do research. It affected my ability to properly TA. I was becoming psychotic in my search for the causing the itching that would not cease.
Finally, I got the private dermatologist. He suggested bed bugs and told us to search again. This time, the infestation had grown and we found them. It was such a relief to know the cause.
However, the cure is neither fast nor simple nor cheap for bed bugs. Insecticides are ineffective as they only eat mammalian blood and the most effect insecticides these days need to be ingested by the organism. The most effect thing is physical removal of the insects, their eggs, and their larva. The eggs and larva are tiny and it takes very careful searching to find and clean them all.
We spent every night for months search with magnifying glasses and powerful flash lights while washing and drying our bedding (heat treatment (or cold) is the only sure fire solution to bed bugs). It took many months but eventually we found them all and with the help the pest man's insecticides prevented the infestation from growing out of control. Needless to say we moved and bought a new bed when our lease was up!
Even today years later, I still fear unexplained itching. It think that for me, I could have developed a psychosis where I believe I am being bitting by invisible bugs if we had not found the infestation. It took a long time for my mental state to recover and if it had gone on for 6, 12 months of unexplained bites and itching I may have become very unstable. Itching is very difficult to deal with.
I hope that someone can help these people find an effective way for them individually to deal with the itching even if for some it is only in their minds.