bedbuggered!

Have i finally lived the New York experience in its entirety? Am i finally a big city veteran who has lived the best and worst and everything in between?
Nope.
But i do have bedbugs.
And it's %&*#ing Peyton Manning's fault.
It began about two months ago. I was browsing for books in Goodwill. I spied "Manning", about Archie and his sons. Even though i'm a casual sports fan at best, that damned Peyton, with his on-field humility and puckishly hilarious commercials, had enchanted me. I love a good bio. Sometimes i even love a mindless one. I bought the book.
Would that something else had happened that day, like a nice mugging.
A week or so later, i'm reading the book in bed, and notice a small, strange bug on it. I squish it, and think of it no more.
A week or so later...
I'm awoken from sleep in the middle of the night by the sensation of something touching my wrist. Immediately my mind tells me that a spider was just on me. No problem. Be nice to spiders. I pull the covers back.
That ain't no spider.
In fact, it's two not-spiders.
I'm not positive what they are, but somewhere inside, i get an ominous feeling...
I grab a napkin, and squish them into wet redness (red, i will later learn, because of my blood). They're a little resistant to squishing, sort of like wannabe ticks. They move just a little faster than ticks. Not fast at all.
The following morning, i strip my bed and find a couple more in the sheets. I take them and the blankets and my clothes to the washing machine. I get the bottle of organic bedbug spray from the tenant upstairs...he had them last year. I find another four or five bugs in the seams of the mattress. I vacuum the mattress. It rests on about twenty slats, and as i take them up i find six or seven more, plus dark stains denoting poop or eggs (poop, it turns out). I replace the slats after spraying them on both sides. Before bed, i spray again between the slats and the frame.
I get one night of restful sleep. No, that's a lie. I don't see a bug, but my skin becomes hyper-paranoid, waking me repeatedly, to flick the light on and throw the covers back. I'm also constantly reacting to phantom itches throughout the night.
This started one month ago, and i haven't had a solid night's sleep since.
The stress of bedbugs is not to be underestimated.
The second night, my sleep-interrupted checks reveal bugs several times. Kill. Kill.
Part of the reason my bed got to such an advanced state of infestation is that i'm not particularly reactive to the bugs. None of those horrible-looking welts. Thinking back over the previous week, i realize i was probably bitten a number of times, but all i got from it was a slight itchiness and maybe a faint red mark or two.
People wonder why i didn't immediately call an exterminator. Mostly because my first instinct is rarely to just throw money at a problem. I'm no fan of toxic solutions, either. Living a non-materialist life means dealing with things in a more hands-on way. Even though i could, some people can't afford exterminators.
After three or four days of daily spraying and nightly killing, i repeat the clean-out procedure. This time i purchase a $5 plastic mattress cover.
And am rewarded with TWO whole nights of no bugs.
Three or four days later, i do the procedure again. This time i've done some reading on holistic methods. I learn that exterminators can rarely solve the problem with just one visit. I add rubbing alcohol and cinnamon to my arsenal. The cinnamon is for ingesting: apparently, bedbugs hate it and won't bite cinnamon-eating humans. I put it on my cereal in the morning, and with honey at bedtime.
I'm rewarded with another two bug-free days. Another three or four days after that, i do the procedure again, this time ripping off a cloth strip that connects the slats. I find more hidden bugs and poop. Each measure i add, i will come to realize should have been implemented from the start.
Four or five days later, i do the procedure again. This time i take apart my Ikea wooden bed frame. I find five or six bugs in its innards. I bundle the pieces of the frame in plastic, and store them outside...at the end of January/start of Februay however, we are denied a sustained freezing spell for over two weeks.
In the heart of a NY winter, denied a freezing spell for two weeks.
My mattress now on the floor, i add another weapon to the arsenal. Baby powder. It supposedly chokes them. I take to nightly doing a puff sweep on the edge of the mattress, and around the base of the covers.
This time, i feel i may have finally eliminated them.
No.
With cinnamon and baby powder, it's true that i've only found a live one in my bed once in eight days. My sleep has calmed down enough that i only wake up to bed-check once or twice a night.
But i've still found three or four strays near the bed, half of them rather sad and wasted-looking (or were they just young, and am i projecting the "wasted" aspect?). One i found in the shower, and immediately shaved my bushy little beard, aghast at the thought that one of them had been in my hair. It took me three days to realize that i was still keeping my shower flip-flops near the bed, and probably carried one this way to the shower.
And now...i'm ready to take the mattress up again. And add what i hope will be the final weapon. Heat. The websites say it's more reliable than freezing. One bedbug-phobic friend freaked out so much when i got them, she bought a steamer. When i visit her, i take my clothes off at the door, put them in plastic bags, and shower. She probably gets the steamer out when i'm gone. She's going to loan it to me.
Bedbuggered.
A tendency to overreact might serve you well.
(P.S. Four nights after i spent twelve hours steaming everything i could, another skinny bedbug appeared. The beat goes on.)
(P.P.S. The day after that, a small bedbug appeared on, of all places, the spare toilet paper roll in the bathroom. This was the single most depressing moment of the entire experience, and probably would have broken me. One more sighting, and i was ready to call in the professionals, with their toxic warfare. But then a curious thing happened. Nothing. It is now close to two weeks since the last sighting. Has peace finally come?)
(P.P.P.S. Two and a half weeks after the last sighting, one appeared)
(P.P.P.P.S. And yet two more weeks have gone by, with no sightings...)
(P.P.P.P.P.S. Two months, nothing...)