Have you ever had a mysterious, itchy rash? In honor of the summer vacation season starting, I’m stopping the press on my happy Travels with Allie blogs for this week in order to alert you to a rather ominous possibility you may encounter if you travel this summer . . . or even if you’re just minding your own business trying to live a quiet, peaceable life at home. I am publishing this several months after my problem occurred, just to make sure I have all the details straight, but I’m going to write this as a three-part series while it’s still fresh on my mind. In fact, as I write, it was exactly one week ago today that I discovered a despicable problem.
What is it???
It really started about a month ago when I developed a really nasty rash. It started mostly on my wrists and ankles as singular red welts that looked like mosquito bites, but it was still winter and no mosquitoes were lollygagging in the snowbanks. I wondered if I was hosting a tick, but the answer was negative. What about ants or spiders? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a spider or ants in our bedroom, and there were no telltale trails of ants or spider webs anywhere. As the rash worsened, it started showing up on my neck and hips. It was dreadfully itchy, and then I started getting splotchy red spots as well as discreet bite-sized welts, obviously an allergic reaction to whatever was causing the rash. I had started a new medication, so Alan and I thought it must be a drug reaction. I stopped taking the medication and made an appointment with my doctor to be checked.
Meanwhile, despite stopping medication, my plight worsened. My physician wasn’t available for several weeks, so I made an appointment with her but also accepted an appointment with her P.A. The P.A. had no clue but started me on a different medication to see if that would help. It didn’t.
She offered to send me to an allergist to see if I’d developed an allergy to some cosmetic product or food, but in the meantime, I begin to notice tiny spots following the veins on my arms and ankles and told Alan I was probably doomed to die from some rare blood disease. Ever since we swam to the Devil’s Pool overlooking Victoria Falls in Zambia, I’d been wondering if I’d develop something awful. When we got home from that adventure, a physician who did mission work in that area, said, “You did WHAT? I won’t even touch the water of the Zambezi River—it’s full of bacteria and waterborne parasites that kill a quarter of a million people every year.” We both tested negative for schistosomiasis, but that was just one of many dreadful options.
After several weeks with no relief, I called my sister and asked her to pray with me that I could figure out the cause of the rash. The very next morning (one week ago today as I’m writing this—though several months before publication), I saw a tiny, dark bug crawling across our bed. We have a white comforter, so although it was only about the size and shape of the white part of my little fingernail, I noticed it. We’ve never had cockroaches, but I’ve seen them. Wondering if was a tiny cockroach, I tried to catch it to look at it more closely, but it burst in my fingers and was full of fresh blood. I put it on a Kleenex and studied it under a magnifying glass. It was about the size of an apple seed and shaped like a tick but more elongated.
Alan guessed it might be a bedbug. A bedbug? You mean, like “Good night! Sleep tight! Don’t let the bedbugs bite!”? Wasn’t that just a joke? I remembered hearing stories about bedbugs biting children growing up a century ago, but I thought they’d disappeared. Neither of us had ever seen a bedbug and didn’t even know what they looked like. However, we started studying, and it didn’t take long to realize that this tiny creature was exactly that—an engorged bedbug full of fresh blood.
About then Alan realized that he’d been bitten a lot too. He has eczema so just thought he was having a bad winter and was treating his sore neck and shoulder with cortisone cream to stop the itching. He hadn’t even mentioned it to me, because it wasn’t nearly as severe as what was going on in me. More research revealed that many people are slow to recognize bedbugs because human reactions are so variable. While some people (like me) have seriously bad reactions, somewhere between 30-60% of people don’t react at all, and only about 30% of humans have noticeable reactions. So, in a home with several children, you might have no one reactive, or only one or two people. Don’t be fooled! “We can’t have bedbugs or we’d all have bedbugs” is wrong thinking! If you have even one person in your home with a mysterious rash, think about the possibility of BEDBUGS and get your home tested. (One girlfriend who has since had her home tested did not have bed bugs, but most places will test you for free, so it’s totally worth the inconvenience to have this issue diagnosed and ruled in or out!)
We didn’t need to have our home tested; we tested it ourselves. After ripping our bed apart, we found a tiny enclave of bedbugs in our box springs. In a panic, I asked Alan if we could burn the box springs. We carried it outside, and he torched it. (We live in the country where fires are still legal.) We saw probably 10-20 bugs scurrying away and killed very single one of them with a vicious smush lest any escape. We also destroyed our pillows, bedside rugs, and a notebook I kept by my bed. Anything where we saw a bedbug. There weren’t very many, but it was a truly creepy experience because they’re so tiny. They hate the light so try to retreat to some dark crevice STAT. We thought we got all we saw, but we weren’t convinced. And, what if they were everywhere?
My first reaction was to see if any of our seven children or their families had been experiencing any type of bites at our house. Thankfully, all seven responded negatively. However, we suspected we had more bedbugs still hiding in our bedroom, so we did a quick search on the internet to figure out what to do as well as talking to the Michigan State Extension Service, who (as far as I can tell) knows the best remedies for almost all non-people-caused problems in the state.
Bedbugs are extremely hard to treat, and if we really hoped to get rid of them, we’d need professional help, ideally both chemical and heat treatment. We looked on line and found Michigan Bed Bug Specialists, who were highly rated and reported a 98% success rate in eliminating bedbugs. We called. They offered to come in three days and said they’d eliminate our bedbugs, and that we didn’t need to throw out anything. Their treatment would penetrate and eliminate all our bugs with a 60-day warranty.
Apparently bedbugs have become a serious problem again, but nobody likes to talk about them because they used to be associated with dirty homes. Now, even high-end hotels and department stores can be infected. Paris is a bedbug hotbed, spreading something even nastier than Covid and worrying about how to clean up before they sponsor the 2024 Summer Olympics. Our team from Michigan Bed Bug Specialists said they’ve treated the homes of 2 pilots and 3 airline stewardesses in the past 6 months. Where could we have picked up bedbugs? Anywhere, but after asking a few questions, they suspected we’d picked them in our luggage on our trip to Europe last fall.
Oh! Of course! When we get home from a trip, we lay out towels on our beds (to protect our bed from dirty bags and rollers) and empty our suitcases onto our beds. Talk about a free ride to the best restaurant in our home! I could almost hear Papa Bug: “Come on, gang! Free meat tonight!” Bedbugs are very prolific, and it only takes a few weeks before you’ll be enough of a feast to know you’re being bitten IF YOU REACT. Otherwise, you could have your home crowded with generations of bugs before you have any clue. Honestly, if it hadn’t have been for the Lord’s mercy in answer to our prayer, I don’t know how long it would have taken anyone to properly diagnose our plight . . . and Alan’s a doctor!
Wednesday, I’ll tell you what it was like to have our house treated, and Friday I’ll share what I’ve learned about how to protect your home going forward, because we had two big trips planned to see various of our kids, and I wondered if we should wait until we were done traveling before being treated, given how expensive it was going to be. I can’t promise you they’d give you the same deal they offered me, but they said we needed to be treated immediately, and to seal the deal, they promised to come back and redo the treatment for half price if we have any new infestations during the entire 2024 year. That was the deal-maker for me.
Bedbugs are terrible, but there’s something even more terrible, and that’s becoming infested with tiny sins that bite us in the dark and cause addictive itching in our souls. Some people are very sensitive to sin and it bothers them very quickly, but others seem almost immune until it’s overrun their souls and destroyed their homes. May I urge you to check the lining of your beds and under your beds at night to see if you can find any bedbugs? I would also like to urge you (as I’ve also done myself) to consider the state of your soul. Is there any insidious sin drawing blood on you?
Just as we needed professional help to eliminate bed bugs, we also need ongoing professional help to eliminate the sins in our lives. There is no One who can forgive sins but God, and there is no One who can cleanse us from our sins but Jesus, who died in our place and shed his blood to deliver us from our sins and give us eternal life.
Do you know you have a sin problem? We learn in 1 John 1:8, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” BUT, God promises, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Just as Alan and I would not have recovered from bed bugs without “confessing” our need for help to the Michigan Bed Bug Specialists, we can’t save ourselves from our own proclivity for sin without confessing our need for help from God. Once we acknowledge our sins and repent of the evil it causes in our lives and those of our loved ones, then we’re ready to receive help. God will help us! He has sent Jesus to earth to redeem us. Will you let Jesus save you and lead you to freedom?
“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved” (Romans 10:9-10, ESV).
P.S.—If you do a search and discover you have bed bugs, or if you wonder what it’s like to have your home treated, come back Wednesday, same time, same place, for Part Two of this primer/aka Bedbugs 101! Believe it or not, Grand Rapids, Michigan, is #12 of the top fifty most infested cities in the country, so don’t think our nice, clean city is exempt! Outward appearances can be very deceiving. 😦
Summer Setting 