The same day that we ask, with Rene Laraine, what might be causing his bed bugs to persist despite nine bed bug treatments by licensed PCOs, Nicholas Brown brings to mind similar concerns.

Brown, chronicling his bed bug experience on the Huffington Post, is now well past his seventh week. He has had five treatments (so treatment intervals are not the problem in this case). He is planning treatment six, the last one before he moves.

Again, I would bet money on the neighbors as source.

Like many of us, on this blog that was originally dubbed “Your foxhole, in the war against bed bugs” by its avowedly pacifist creator (yes, people, that’s how much I hate bed bugs), Brown mobilizes the war metaphors for his final assault:

Day 52

There comes a time in most insurgencies when you should cut your losses and leave. Maybe the enemy was more persistent than you imagined; maybe he was better at hiding; or maybe the weapons you used against him were inadequate. In any case, no one has ever accused the United States of pulling out of a conflict too early. And while I am all for America, I dont wish to repeat her mistakes.

I have returned from the farm and the squalor that confronts me confirms that the bedbugs are winning in our apartment. Yes, we have inflicted casualties. Yes, we have damaged their infrastructure. But at the end of the day, there are more of them than there are of us and we cannot win their hearts and minds. Moreover, there is great suspicion within the building that our downstairs neighbors are harboring bedbugs. Despite several requests, they have refused sprayings in their apartment. The bugs, we suspect, hide downstairs until the toxins in our place wear off and then return in greater strength. We can only assume they have training camps. We are keeping diplomatic channels open, but are not optimistic about pacifying either our apartment or the one below us.

We are calling in one more spraying, but the backbone has fallen out of our effort and we do not expect success. Our departure wont involve an embassy swamped with desperate refugees, but it will involve the horrid logistics of moving, made all the more awful by the necessity of inspecting and poisoning or freezing every item before it is packed away. Its a depressing thought, but honestly not all that much more work than washing, drying and sealing away all your clothing and papers and other possessions. Now come the slow logistics of apartment hunting, brokers fees, and long Saturdays devoted to subway rides and open houses. We are optimistic though. In the neon-lit consumerism of the new American Christmas, minor commercial miracles happen all the time. Uncle Bob might get some nose trimmers from the Airmall catalog; Delores might tip a busboy; and cousin Herbie may finally give in to those Debeers commercials and propose to that on-again off-again cocktail waitress he has been seeing for years. And maybe, just maybe, we will find our own minor Christmas miracle: a small apartment thats reasonably priced, relatively clean, and blessedly uninfested.

Unfortunately, we’ve heard from readers who moved almost nothing, took extreme precautions, and nevertheless brought bed bugs with them. In some cases, they chose new, equally infested quarters. Maybe they even rented a truck with bed bugs. But in most cases, they probably simply managed to move their bed bug despite precautions.

It’s worth moving during treatment, and treating at the other end. Yes, anonymous poster who raves when we mention pre-emptive treatment, we know “preventive” treatment isn’t supposed to work. But we know too many nice people who felt they had to pay for treatment in their new digs. This isn’t preventive, it’s reactive.

Good luck to Nicholas Brown. Unlike Amanda’s saga on Apartmenttherapy, I do hope we get to hear the end of the story.

• Nicholas Brown’s “The Bedbug Chronicles: Part 6″ sounds pretty familiar
• bed bug news for 2007-11-09
• The Huffington Post on bed bugs
• The Huffington Post: Nicholas Brown’s bed bugs, volumes 3 and 4

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In this installment, we learn that bed bugs are taking a significant toll on Brown’s self-identity and social life:

Despite my anger, even our bug-laden living situation is finally normalizing. This process started first as a change in identity: I now think of myself as ‘the guy with bedbugs.’ It’s how I introduce myself. Maybe it’s not the first thing I say, but it will come up in the first five minutes of a conversation. I am taking an acting class and in the first session I said “hey, I am Nick and I have bedbugs,” as if I was in some particularly gross AA session. When I hear someone mention bedbugs in a conversation at a table next to me, I feel obliged to chime in.

They’re also making home very disorganized and uncomfortable, no small problem for someone whose office is at home. Things are not where they used to be; instead, they’re in bags all over the place:

While I am tempted to reassemble my room and my office (which are the same place), I realize there is every chance that the bugs will be back again so I have stopped trying to create a livable space and now just settle for someplace with interior heating.

We also learn that Brown still has bed bugs, well past the 30-day window landlords are given to eliminate bed bugs, under local housing laws. It is not unusual for landlords to need more time, though. Turns out, there are other reasons to be angry at the landlord:

Day 39

Our landlord, we discovered today, knew this apartment had bugs. The previous tenants moved out because of the bedbugs. The whole building - minus our apartment - was sprayed for bedbugs in the months after we moved in. No one mentioned this to us.

Isn’t this illegal? As I commented on the paragraph above, on Nicholas Brown’s blog, this should be illegal. Landlords should not be able to rent out an apartment that is known to be infested with bed bugs, to an unsuspecting tenant. I have a suspicion, however, that it already violates the housing laws. If any NYC rental housing experts are reading this, perhaps they could clarify.

Moreover, if the entire building except one apartment was being treated, any experienced PCO and even the landlord should realize that this might drive even more bed bugs into this unit.

What strikes me most about Brown’s saga, through these six installments, is how very typical it is. We at bedbugger.com have heard it all many times. While I am horrified to hear Brown’s tale, I thank him for sharing it in such a public medium.

By doing so, he may just convey the mess that bed bugs create in one’s life, as well as how easy it is to get them, and how very difficult it is to get rid of them, to those not yet in the know. And that recognition, my friends, is the first step in getting everyone else to help us fight the problem.

• Brown student wants to provide free bed bug treatment to those who can’t pay
• landlords talking about bed bugs
• Brooklyn tenant not warned of bed bugs before moving in
• New York City: Who’s responsible for paying for bed bug treatment? Complicated, in some cases.

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• TheStar.com | News | Bedbugs a bane for Barrie pair
  Bed bugs can afflict anyone, but elderly people like June’s sister, living in senior housing where the problem was neglected, are some of the most tragic cases. June and Alan caught bed bugs from June’s sister, after helping to prep for bedbug treatment.
  (tags: barrie ontario bedbugs canada elderly seniors elderlyhousing news 2007 nov2007 epidemic spread)
• Nicholas Brown: Bedbug Chronicles 5 - Living Now on The Huffington Post
  Nicholas Brown on bed bugs: he’s had two sprayings and they’re still going strong.
  (tags: bedbugs blogs nicholasbrown huffingtonpost journalistgetsbedbugs)

• bed bug news for 2007-11-11: Lexington, KY and Toronto, ON
• bed bugs in Toronto; Vancouver; Billings, MT,
• bed bug news for 2007-11-16
• bed bugs in Virginia Beach (again), Brown County, Ohio, and potential health risks

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He posted volume 3 last week, which chronicles the “laundry and first treatment” phase. Somewhat unconventionally, Brown as his roommates Katherine and Jihad had not done much prep before their PCO showed up. He was kind enough to come back a few hours later, and so the team flew into motion. Brown’s style is engaging and the laundromat saga, in which the pushy ladies of the laundromat are put in their places, is fairly fun reading:

Our neighborhood has relatively few Laundromats and almost no one has a washer and dryer in-building, resulting in an atmosphere of intense and sometimes uncomfortably physical competition for the few available dryers. The already charged atmosphere is made particularly dangerous at our local Laundromat by a series of heavyset neighborhood Grand dames who are willing to throw their weight around. When I walked into the Laundromat, Katherine was facing down one such woman who had taken her clothes out of a washer and thrown them on the floor.

“What, you want to use all the dryers here at once!” the woman said

“Actually, yes.”

“Your clothes are dry.”

“They have bugs,” Katherine said.

Apparently she hadn’t mentioned this earlier. The effect was satisfying. Most people took at least a small step back and the grand dame who had been facing us down retreated completely. One woman, who had been rummaging through our clothes in an attempt to clear a dryer for herself, jerked her hands back so rapidly and with so much revulsion that it looked like the beginnings of an epileptic fit.

Volume 3 concludes with the “wait and be bait” period following the first treatment.

Volume 4 details various “crackpot” ideas for fighting bed bugs. My only critique would be that he nixes the idea of freezing books (when, in fact, freezing is a legit method for killing bed bugs), and freezes his VCR instead (note: I would not do this with electronics).

What Brown describes well is the experimental nature of so many solutions bed bug victims concoct. The last time people in New York City commonly had to deal with bed bugs was before World War II. Some of the folk remedies of that time worked and were dangerous, others probably did not work. In 2007, we are luckier than our ancestors; we have resealable bags, washing and drying machines, zipped encasements. Information travels faster now, but so does misinformation. Caveat bedbugger.

Brown also captures well the stress of life during bed bug wartime. By day 24 he says,

Our nerves are on edge. While it’s true that bedbugs generally fall into the category of ‘pests,’ it is underreported that they are also life-changing experiences. It is said that the three most stressful times in life surround divorces, moves, and new children. Bedbugs are surely a close fourth.

If I forget to take out the garbage one morning, I come home to find an angry Katherine. If I Jihad or Katherine move my things, I become irrationally angry. We lurk about the apartment during the day waiting to explode at one another. We are all angry at the creatures, but it is very hard to take out fury on an insect so we target snide remarks and well-timed sighs at one another instead. The emotionally traumatizing effects of these creatures are probably foreign to anyone who has not had them, but bystanders beware: bedbug victims are emotional landmines. Do not misstep near us.

Wise words. I hope Brown and Company have gotten a follow-up treatment 10-14 days after their first treatment. Judging from his description of the bed frame, they had a lot of bed bugs. From what we hear, one treatment is rarely enough, even in lighter cases.

Like the saga of Amanda’s bed bugs over at Apartment Therapy, Brown’s story is compelling reading. Like Amanda, he also introduces an unsuspecting new audience to the horrors of dealing with bed bugs, that we here at Bedbugger.com are all too familiar with. Some of the comments on the earlier installments are a healthy reminder that the vast majority of folks still are blissfully ignorant about bed bugs (a double-edged sword if ever there was one).

I don’t think we ever got the final update on Amanda, unless I missed it? Last entry I saw was #8, in which after two treatments, her bed bugs were “back.” (By back, I mean, they “never entirely left.”)

• Nicholas Brown’s Bedbug Chronicles, Part 7
• Nicholas Brown’s “The Bedbug Chronicles: Part 6″ sounds pretty familiar
• Apartmenttherapy.com: Amanda update (#7)
• Charlotte, NC Salvation Army Women’s Shelter has bed bugs again

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Here’s a snippet:

Day 2

Jihad walked up the stairs today and our neighbor, Isabella, began — without provocation — to discuss the serious issue of bedbugs and how they are affecting New York. Jihad told her that we have bedbugs and her eyes lit up like a child’s on Christmas.

“You have bedbugs!” she said aghast, but somehow also terribly excited. “Well they are impossible to get rid of!”

Jihad thanked her for this tidbit but she insisted on coming upstairs and called me out into the hallway. “Yes?” I said.

“I hear you have bedbugs,” Isabella said.

Undisguised examples of Schadenfreude are rare in society. Usually, people will tuck it away under a façade of sympathy. When you see one, it’s a really special moment.

“They are impossible to get rid of,” Isabella said, smiling.

Interestingly, Brown’s neighbor’s first instinct is not to wonder if she has them or might catch them. It’s wonder and excitement at someone else’s misfortune.

Bed bugs aren’t impossible to get rid of, but it’s not easy either. You need dedication, help, tools, and for everyone to cooperate (whether it’s your roommates or family or your neighbors and landlord).

The tone of this piece, as well as the neighbor’s reaction, suggest that word is really getting around about bed bugs. That in New York, at least, we’re getting past the point where people haven’t heard of bed bugs, or don’t believe they really exist. That is good news in the sense, in terms of awareness being raised, but bad news in that it came at the price of many people having to deal with this problem.

I look forward to reading the next installment and hopefully finding out that the only pest they have to deal with now is the nosy neighbor.

• The Huffington Post: Nicholas Brown’s bed bugs, volumes 3 and 4
• Marty Markowitz’s building has bed bugs
• Dayton and Middletown, Ohio: avoiding bed bugs is difficult
• New Discovery Channel series follows pest control operators at work

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