My Bedbug War

I trusted human brain power gave me the edge. Then getting rid of bedbugs made me crazy.

Is there a more welcoming haven than your own bed? Mary Pratt painted this one.

It was exactly one week till moving day, and every corner of our home teemed with boxes. Only the bed, with its brocade throw cushions in a regal crimson, had escaped the rising tide of bubble wrap and packing paper. The bed looked just as it always had, except for a curious blood spot on my side of the sheet. Must have cut myself. Jane will deal with the spot. Jane was our longtime cleaning lady, our personal Martha Stewart. Not a stain, scratch or smell could escape her zeal for wreaking order. That Wednesday morning in December, she had come for yet another packing spree while I took care of urgent matters like hunting for the scissors.

In moving mode, a state both addled and obsessed, I am forever buying scissors to replace the ones I just mislaid, and then cursing the rule of nature that ensures the new scissors will vanish within the hour. I was wondering how a competent adult can make such a botch of scissors when Jane announced that she had something to draw to my attention. “I just took your sheet off the bed and a little brown bug fell on the carpet. It was about the size of a flax seed. When I squished it, blood spurted out. That thing just had a good feed.”

Bed. Bug. Blood. In search of a benign explanation, I called public health, where a crisp female voice pronounced judgment on the matter. “Any bug that’s full of blood is definitely a bedbug.”

Why did I think it couldn’t happen to us? I’d seen breathless news reports in my own city—mattresses tossed, clothes bagged for quarantine, intractable itches erupting while money flew out the door for pricey and time-consuming treatments. If you ever eat out, catch a movie or sit in a subway car, the blood-sucking creepy crawlies can get you too. They’re on the march around the world—and the more you travel, the greater your risk. We’d been spending close to 90 nights a year away from home, and I had blithely unpacked my bag on hotel beds from Beijing to Buenos Aires without once checking under the mattress for bugs.

They’ve been known to invade the most luxurious establishments. Seth Kugel, who investigates travel disasters for The New York Times, recently went to bat for an American couple who woke up covered in bites at the Abbaye-des-Vaux-de-Cernay, billed on its website as a “majestic estate steeped in history, from Cistercian origins to the golden age of the Rothschilds.” The pair sought compensation for their stay plus medical and other expenses totaling $1,850, but the hotel declined to pay a cent. Its pest control company, with sniffer dog in tow, checked every corner of the room and found no evidence of bedbugs. Nearly 700 readers weighed in with their own bedbug tales, tips and obscurities, proof that one itchy encounter can ignite a lasting fixation.

Don’t I know it. Some 15 years after my own bedbug misadventure, I still shudder at the sight of a flax seed. That couple who complained to the Times had it easy compared to us. They weren’t closing the sale of a bug-infested home in nine days. According to the woman at public health, we would need two stem-to-gudgeon chemical treatments 14 days apart.

I slammed down the phone and wept.

Bedbugs will not make you sick. They might not even make you itch (my husband scratched up a storm, I felt nothing). What they’re bound to do is make you crazy. Your sanctuary and playground, your bed, is now a combat zone where the enemy strikes by stealth. You won’t feel the bite; nature has engineered the bugs to inject an anesthetic first. Wherever you go, they go. “Bedbugs,” as we call them, are couch bugs, desk bugs, swivel-chair and stool bugs. Brainy they are not. You put your trust in human ingenuity and grit.

I wiped away my tears and phoned the pest-control people who told the best story online. A cheery young woman embellished the tale. Why settle for chemical treatment, the humble bow and arrow of extermination? Her crew offered the nuclear option: heat treatment that would cook our soon-to-be vacated home at 135 degrees Fahrenheit, destroying not just the bedbugs but their eggs. It would cost several thousand dollars, just a detail with the sale of our home on the line.

This was war. And by God I would win.

“How soon can you get here?” I asked, thinking “tomorrow.” I was offered a week from tomorrow, the day after our move. Unless the big roast preceded the move, it would all be for naught. More tears till I got transferred to the keeper of the roasting apparatus—Captain Exterminator himself. Like another dauntless captain, James T. Kirk of Starship Enterprise, he had one of those steadying voices that wrap you in the confidence of victory at hand. His people would fit me in on Monday morning, two days before the move, between 12 and 1. Paul and I would leave home in bug-free clothes fresh from the dryer and check into a hotel (hoping it too was not infested) while the bedbugs sizzled away.

As it happened, I was not done sobbing. I wept again on Monday at 2 when Captain Exterminator’s band of saviors had not arrived. And at 5 when, soon after they appeared, their four massive electric heaters chugged into action only to plunge the entire condo into darkness. The crusty Eastern European super insisted, gesticulating madly, that heat would never work. I’d been suckered by a fad. What was wrong with tried-and-true chemicals?

The pest control team, who barely spoke English, muttered on the phone to Captain Exterminator. I caught the dread words “otro dia.” At last a worker handed me the phone. “We’ll handle this,” the Captain promised. “The guys will drive back to the warehouse and get the propane heater.”

Curses flew about weepy women making pity plays (not my style but bedbugs had scrambled my brain).

This plan was not exactly problem-free. Propane would generate so much heat, the device could not be placed within our walls. Since we had no patio or balcony, that left the sidewalk outside our ground-floor unit. The door would stay open all night. In the heart of downtown Toronto, where street people roam up and down trying doors, we’d be effing doorless. A burly team member vowed to guard the place, but I still imagined vandals wreaking havoc.

The super, meanwhile, had dark visions of his own—the building in flames, disabled residents trapped. Fists shook (his). Tears flowed (mine). Curses flew about weepy women making pity plays (not my style but bedbugs had scrambled my brain). With night fallen and time running out, I rang Captain Exterminator, whose Kirkian calm went some distance with the super.

Just one little glitch remained: the sprinklers. When our place began to cook, they’d unleash a flood. The captain got creative. We’d position bags of ice on painters’ stools directly under each sprinkler head. If Paul and I schlepped 20 bags of ice, the pros would take care of the rest.

Captain Exterminator, my hero.

When you have bedbugs, you crave nothing more than the death of every last crawler and egg. I thought we’d pulled it off, the captain and I. Our purchaser settled into our expensively roasted former home (yes, she knew about the bedbugs and the bundle we’d spent fighting back). We hung the art in our new place. Any day, we could host friends for dinner—unthinkable if bedbugs might crawl up their legs. I don’t recall when or where Jane found another bedbug, only my plummet from relief to desperation. The sneaky devils had followed us.

Bedbugs are marvels of resilience. They can hold out for months without a feed. They’ll slip through the tiniest cracks to find their next hidey-hole. And when a propane heater blasts the home you’ve packed for the movers, they can hunker down inside your boxes, wrapped in layers of packing paper. How hot does it get in such a nest, with the door wide open to the December night and bags of ice under the sprinkler heads? What seemed at the time like inspired troubleshooting turned out be a wild burst of hope.

A good day, to a general in a bedbug war, is a day without an insect the size of a flax seed dropping out of your pants.

The captain offered me his next high-tech weapon: freeze the bastards. Even with his discount for repeat customers, we were in for a hefty sum. But I trusted my man. Surely this time he’d nail it.

A good day, to a general in a bedbug war, is a day without an insect the size of a flax seed dropping out of your pants. Without your spouse showing you a red welt on his shin. After the big chill, we had a run of such days. It didn’t last. The captain and I became the best of pals. Every few weeks, I’d send him a carcass taped to my letterhead. Some were other insects, some only flecks of lint. What did I tell you? Crazy. One rust-colored find turned out to be the enemy itself. I might have qualified for a lifetime deal with the captain, but I didn’t stick around to find out.

In fairy tales and legends, the things that matter come in threes. Three little pigs, three bears, three witches. The third treatment, with old-fashioned chemicals, crushed the bedbugs for a couple hundred bucks. Multi-thousand-dollar ministrations had reduced them to a few stragglers, so I can’t say the captain took me for a ride. The bedbugs themselves made a fool of me.

I just looked for the website that sold me on the captain. All I found was a smattering of one-star reviews. As for Paul and me, we’ve learned to keep our luggage off the beds in hotels. It belongs in the bathtub, I’m told, but we have cranky old knees and no patience with the far extremes of prevention: Check the mattress with a flashlight, strip the bedding, look behind mirrors and picture frames. Unscrew the headboard in your room, and you might find them ready to strike. Who’s crazier, obsessed bedbug hunters or mellow travelers like us?

The bedbugs, meanwhile, just keep on doing what they do best. No hubris, no emotion, just nature’s faultless engineering. When we humans are barely hanging on after an apocalypse of our own making, bedbugs will meet the challenge. Bedbugs don’t do crazy.

Have you declared war on a pest? Or survived a moving disaster? You’re in the right place. Your comments are a joy to me and every reader who follows the unfolding conversation. When people come together to share defining moments and revelations, there’s no such thing as a stranger.

Did you know I offer personal coaching for writers? Today I’m cheering for my client Louise Gallagher, who went undercover as a prostitute and told the heart-piercing tale in a featured essay for Spillwords.

Louise wanted to understand what keeps desperate teens on the street—and thanks to her vivid storytelling, I now get it too. She says of our work on a story she has carried for more than 20 years, “Rona was indispensable in helping me tighten, focus and let go of all the fluff.” If 2026 is your year to hone your craft with a seasoned and clear-eyed mentor, let’s book a free conversation to see if we’re a fit.

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