Thursday, April 8, 2010

Bloodsuckers

We’ve had a major bed bug infestation in our apartment. I'd never really heard too much about this kind of thing, because it's not very common in India. They can't survive above 45 C and they don't like dusty places. Ha. You would think you were less likely to have bugs if your apartment was clean.

Apparently these little vampires spread over from neighboring apartments - that's one of the many ways in which they spread - and they reproduce so fast you really can't imagine it. A female can lays about 5 eggs a day. Plus, they can live for 18 months without food.

The building management has had the exterminators come in and treat the apartment twice and we did it once ourselves. But it doesn't really help too much. Strong pesticides like DDT are illegal here. The others don't really kill them, because they can go and hide in the neighbors’ apartment and then come back once the pesticide wears off. Now you have an infested apartment and infested neighboring apartments. There’s also some rubbing alcohol that can be sprayed on them, but you have to spray it on the bug to kill it. It’s just not humanly possible to spray every single bug, given the rate at which they multiply.

They can nest in anything wooden, paper, or fabric. Now we're going to move and discard everything that might be infected and cannot be treated. Clothes can be treated by running them in the dryer on high heat. But that's about all. Clothes, kitchen utensils. That’s it. We can't take anything else with us. We have to part with almost brand new furniture that we spent thousands of dollars on. Plus we have to part with bed linen, some of which was a gift, and stuffed toys, greeting cards, picture frames - just about everything of sentimental value. We’re not even sure how safe it is going to be if we take our passports, academic certificates and other papers with us, but that is a risk we have to take.

Anyway, we have been apartment hunting and we have found a couple of places we like. We’re just trying to get out of here as soon as we can.

Anyway, I know I'm rambling on too much about this, but that’s how life is these days. But hey, what has happened has happened. Can’t do anything about it, can we? Just trying to accept it and move on with life.

4 comments:

actinium said...

awww! i feel awfully sorry for u :-(

Bhavya said...

Thanks...

actually this is an older post that was somehow lying around in my drafts, now we've had some time for it to sink in, and we're getting around to accepting things and moving on. so I may have to give up the Grim Reaper, but it's not the end of the world

Prats said...

Thats such a waste.... you seriously cant do anything about those bugs? Like Heating your home above 45 degrees or sth...Its so painful to leave ur home because of damn insects.

Bhavya said...

nope... can't heat the whole house that much. the highest setting on the thermostat is 90 F and it doesn't actually reach that high. I don't really think it's worth it to set up our own heating system that will heat that much. But we have found a heating device on Amazon that can heat a lot of our personal items, so we may be able to salvage some of those.