Shanspirations

…Continued from Our Bug Nightmare Part 3

The thing I have found most helpful for getting a good night’s sleep (something I became desperate for during all of this) is to make a paste of diatomaceous earth and water and spread it all over my skin before going to bed.

Diatomaceous earth is ground up diatom fossils; to us the powder is like talc, to tiny insects it is sharp like glass and pierces their exoskeletons, dehydrating and killing them.

I didn’t know if it would really work on an insect so small (we have never been able to see these things), but it made an amazing difference for me. I am getting fairly decent sleep every night now and am so glad for that after weeks of being bleary-eyed.

The depressing thing is that we don’t know how to get rid of whatever this is. We have tried pesticides, insecticide powder, special soaps, enzyme cleaner, and more. We wash our bedding every day and never wear the same thing twice without washing it. We also seal our laundry up until it goes in the wash. All of this seems to help, but we want them to go away completely.

I am always in fear of passing this on to someone else and it has greatly limited our hospitality and social life. We had also temporarily stopped going to church, not wanting to sit in a pew and then later have someone else sit in the same spot and contract this. Now we are going and sitting in metal chairs we set up in the back. We hold our daughter and don’t let her touch or play with the other children.

It feels awful to feel like I’m contaminated and can’t just interact normally with people at church. We try to avoid hugs and close contact. Many people know what we are going through (and are very supportive, btw), but many don’t know and I don’t know what to say. It’s not something I want to talk about at length with everybody because, really, I’d rather escape from thinking about it when I’m at church.

Four people (three coworkers of Jacob’s and, one, a friend) have had symptoms similar to ours since this all started.

One used the soap and products we had found most effective and bombed his car and home; he also changed hotel rooms nightly and his symptoms have gone away (his family never got any). He now wonders if it was “all in his head.” Personally, I think it was real, but that he was sucessful because he was so aggressive from the start.

The other person said her doctor told her he has been seeing a lot of people complaining of the same symptoms. He says it is not scabies, but doesn’t know what it is. He told her she is not going crazy, that others are going through this, too. He prescribed Lindane, but that was weeks ago and at this point it seems not to have worked.

The third person only had mild symptoms that started, but then seemed to stop–”Maybe I just have dry skin,” he said.

And the fourth person also can’t figure out if this is in his head and simply dry skin or something real. My husband and I don’t know what to make of it. For us there has never been any question this was real, but we think we brought home a lot of the bugs and maybe their eggs all at once from the shop in Saratoga. We don’t know what it would be like to only start out with a few. Would it be hard to tell? How do we know if this is very contagious or not?

Before six and a half weeks ago, my husband and I did not think about bugs. We were living a normal life and never dreamed something like this could happen to us. Now it has become something that dominates daily life.

So far our doctor, Anna’s pediatrician, the exterminator, Jacob’s bosses and coworkers, our friends, church, and family have all been sympathetic and understanding of what we are going through. No one has disbelieved us or thought we were crazy. We are thankful; the support and sympathy we have received from others means so much to us.

I’ve been sharing bits from Jacob’s journal throughout this account of our biting bug experience. Here are some last ones that didn’t seem to fit anywhere as I wrote, but that describe what our daily work and experience have often been these days:

10/9/06: I only slept so-so; Shannon had a rough night and woke up often to spray the bugs and thrash about.

On Sunday I got up around 9:00 am and made an omlette for breakfast and played with Anna. Then went and talked with Shannon for a while about our day. Later we came into the kitchen and had ‘church’ since we couldn’t go to the real thing.

We got the plastic bins from the car and started sorting laundry. The bugs were definately in there since they started biting us as we worked with the laundry. I had to take a break to work on a project that had to get done for work, which took about 3 hrs, then we went to the laundromat and did our wash.

After that we came home and worked for several more hours sorting and bagging clothes. Then we took them over to storage, I can’t believe how many bags of clothes are over there and we still have much more to go.

After taking care of that we came home, vacuumed, sprayed everywhere, then Shannon and Anna took a bath while I made the beds and got everything ready. Finally I showered and went to sleep at about 1am. I slept well, but woke up in the morning at 7:00am getting bitten frequently.

On Monday I worked very late (8:30pm) on a project at work, then came home and went shopping w/ Anna for food. Then we came home, cleaned up, and went to bed early (11:30pm).

“B” called around 1:30am. He was afraid that he was experiencing mites. We talked for a while and I got some soap, enzyme cleaner, and disinfectant spray put it on the porch for them to pick up. They bombed their apartment and then washed and froze their clothes. This news made it difficult for me to sleep for fear and worry.

10/11/06: We had a very good night for the first part, then at some point I started to get bit hard. It made the rest of the night less restful.

10/12/06: “The apartment manager stopped by and I talked with him at length. He agreed that it was fine to bomb the apartment multiple times. Then I talked with the pest control guy for a while. He will treat with an ultracide later this weekend.

I went to storage and dropped stuff off there. We also did laundry and wanted to bomb the apartment, but we needed to clean out our hall closet and our living room closet, as well as take down all the hanging curtains and decorations in our bedroom.

10/13/06: “Worked on packing away all hanging things in the bedroom as well as decorative items in there. In the study we took Anna’s dresser to storage as well as all the decorative items on it. In the living room we cleaned out the front closet and moved all but my tools to storage. Shannon cleaned out the hall closet and we moved all of that to storage as well.

The night came fast, we went to the storage area in the late afternoon and sorted Anna’s clothes, it was very cold and dark out there. Then we came home and straightened the living room and other rooms. I went and did laundry…”

10/16/06: “I met the pest control guy. We talked while he sprayed and had a good discussion about God, politics, etc.

Then I returned to the laundromat, we washed, dried, and bagged in individual zip-loc bags almost all our laundry.

After all that we finally made it to our hotel.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Biting Mites? Our Bug Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.