We haven’t posted in a while. More than three months now actually. Life sort of got in the way. I know, I know. That’s the excuse we all make. If any of you were actually following us, we’re sorry. Really.

But then again, for about three months, we’ve really had it bad.

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Bedbugs

It’s true what they say: life is different before and after bed bugs. They’re not just bugs. They’re creatures from hell. They feed on your blood every night–or day, if they’re really hungry. And the itch? Man, there’s nothing quite like it. No dosage of antihistamine was enough to dull the itch of a bedbug bite.

It all started during the last week of May. I started having these itchy red bumps on my skin every several days. First it was only on my extremities, then I started getting it on my back and even on my neck. It was hard to believe they were from a bedbug because:

• We weren’t able to see anything on our apartment even after a thorough cleaning.

• Timmy didn’t have anything on his body (turns out, he belongs to the lucky half of the planet’s population who don’t react to bedbug bites at all).

I’ve been to two doctors and had two ugly scars to carry my entire life from a skin biopsy. They weren’t able to figure out what’s causing the rashes (the dermatologist said it’s dermatitis based on the skin biopsy and there’s nothing she could do about it–I just have to learn how to deal with it).

It was very hard to sleep at night because of the severe itchiness. I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and discover I have a new rash. Then it happened more frequently, almost every night.

I started getting really paranoid. Am I seriously sick? Have I developed a severe allergy to god knows what?

That’s when I decided to see one more doctor, an allergist. From the very first time he laid eyes on my rashes, he was able to tell me right away that they were from bedbugs. He even showed me a picture of his own daughter that got bitten as well. To alleviate my paranoia, he offered to do some allergy tests, but he insisted I might not even need it because he was positive what’s causing my suffering were the blood-sucking demons living in my apartment.

That night, we called our landlord. After deep inspection of our bed, and only after destroying the sheet underneath the box spring, he finally saw this…this…this AWFULNESS:

Upon seeing that THING above (if you can even call it that), it was a mixture of disgust, anger, and relief. Finally, at least, we know what’s been causing all these suffering. Then again, in order to get rid of them (because of course it probably has siblings, and worse, children of its own, albeit “invisible” to us at the time) there was a LOT of work to be done.

And it really was. It was easily the most stressful week of our married life. We had to stay at hotels for an entire week while our apartment is getting treated. We had to deep clean the entire apartment as well, got rid of a lot of things, including our bed  just to be safe, even though the exterminator didn’t say that we needed to.

It was pretty fucking expensive.

We were both very tired from the moving, packing, cleaning, and uncertainty if the problem is really going to be solved once we got back to our apartment. We got displaced from our own home and it was incredibly difficult for Timmy and I. We were homebodies at our core. We got grumpy from the stress and snapped at each other.

It was a bad week.

Hell, it was a miserable three months.

But it didn’t end bad. In the midst of it all, we were and have always been a team. We talked and acknowledged that we didn’t hate each other, just the situation, and that we just needed to communicate better rather than taking it out on each other. Timmy is a wonderful friend, husband, and teammate. He was my ray of sunshine when I felt like giving up. Always has been.

Now, we have gotten rid of a lot of things–to think that we didn’t even have a lot even before the whole bed bug fiasco. We clean and declutter regularly, at least once a week really. We bought a “bedbug-safe” bed frame (no box springs needed) and took a whole lot of precautions to ensure that whole hellish experience never happens again. I guess that would be a post on its own.

Right now, we could both sleep at peace every night. And we NEVER let the bedbugs bite.

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New Jobs

Aside from dealing with bedbugs, we also have to manage and adapt to our new jobs. Timmy and I now have different jobs than what we started the year with and hopefully this would the last change until at least a couple of years. It was hard juggling “health problems” (bedbugs are a health problem, for me at least) with all the other adjustments in your life.

I had to dress up for work wearing long-sleeves in the middle of summer because of the bed bug bites all over my arms and forearm. It was embarrassing, to say the least. That’s only an additional factor–there’s all the other new hire stresses and adjustments I had to deal with. Timmy had a difficult experience as well with his own job but I’m sure he’s going to write about it in his own time.

Needless to say, it had been an anxiety-inducing couple of months for us. If you’ve survived reading this long, I’m pretty sure you’re starting to get anxious as well, too.

To make up for that (or perhaps as a complement?), here’s a picture of us having milkshake at the beach:

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Moving Out

In about a month and a couple of days, we also would start moving out to a new apartment. Timmy have lived in our present apartment for almost five years now. We’ve wanted to move since last year, the bedbug incident was just the last straw and what really pushed us to make it happen.

Even though I know it would be stressful and there’s still quite a bit of preparations to be done, I still am quite excited to move to the new place. We’d be on the first floor (right now we live on the third floor) and the space would be much bigger. Not to mention it would probably be just a five- to ten-minute drive to work–for both of us! Fingers crossed that we won’t be sharing the new space to any creatures from hell, like Satan, or worse, bedb–bu–buu…

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P.S. You survived my long whine. Congrats.