Bed Bugs

So way back in the middle of January, I noticed Hailey had some itchy red bumps on her. We called them bug bites for fun but in winter there aren't any bugs. We happened to go going to the doctor's office around this time for her stuttering. Hailey pointed out her bites to which the doctor just thought she must has rubbed against something irritating and spread it around by scratching since it was on her hands, arms, and a little on her legs.  It wasn't really a big deal.

Then about two weeks later, Hannah has the same bites and they bother her more. Hailey still had her bites but didn't scratch at them much. I got them about a week or two after Hannah. Around that time, Rachel and Hannah were at the doctor's for well baby visits. We pointed at the bites again and the doctor thought it was a little strange that I had them. This time he pulled out is book and showed me the rash he thought it was. It had a very long name so I forgot which one it was. The doctor said it could take 8-12 weeks to go away. That's a long time but what could we do.

On February 23, it was a pretty typical day where Hannah napped well. Nathan came home a little early and needed to fill up his scooter with gas. The kids love to ride with him on the scooter. So Hannah was the first one to go. As she got the bike hamlet on and was sitting in front of Nathan ready to go, she screamed a little and went into a seizure. It lasted about a minute and I put in my notes that when she got out the the seizure, her legs were still shaking a bit like she was cold.  That day she was very itchy and pretty cranky so I gave her benadryl around 3:00pm to help calm her down. I am guessing that this seizure happened because the rash bothers her so much that it disturbs her sleep a lot.

A few weeks later, Nathan mentioned that he was getting itchy also.  However, I've tried everything and was told there is nothing to do but wait it out.

Then Nathan went out to his interview in Laramie, WY, and Hannah had 6 seizures within a 24 hour period (March 20th) which I already blogged about.  She got a blessing that the doctors would have the answers for us. When I went, we found out that Hannah developed pneumonia because during one of the seizures fluid was introduced into her lungs. Also since still had her bites/rash was still a bother, the doctor decided to treat it as scabies. Scabies is like lice for the skin where little mites borrow under your skin and stay there. So you rub this cream over your entire body and it suffocates them. One treatment of this cream should do the trick. However, Hannah kept getting new bites everyday.  Since we were all using her cream and running out fast, I went to my doctor so we could get more under my name. My doctor wasn't very certain what the bites were either. He said the scabies like to burrow between the fingers which was a place we didn't get bite at all. But he gave me the cream and said to come back in two weeks if it hasn't got away and then at that point we'll do skin scrapping to see if we can find the bug.

Then we went to Utah for Spring Break. We covered everyone in the cream before we left and while there no one was scratching very much.  We came home around 12:00am. Hannah didn't sleep well at all and came out of the room when Rachel woke up and fell asleep on our living room floor. By 6:00am she was covered in red bites that just made her miserable. So my conclusion was that whatever our problem was, it's not in our skin but in the house.  I vacuumed and changed sheets. Hannah was still in a toddler bed but she sleeps half way off of it so I took that downstairs and brought up an extra twin size mattress for her so she'll stop sleeping on the carpet.

I talked with a couple of friends about this problem and they mentioned bed bugs, which I thought was just a part of a cute bed time rhyme. I didn't think they were real.  But we tried everything thing else, so now we called the bug guys to investigate our problem.

The bug guys confirmed we had bed bugs. They sprayed the cracks and crevices in the rooms upstairs the Friday before Easter. However, since they were based out of Boise, they didn't have their streamer and won't have it until Monday. So Friday through Monday we lived downstairs.  Also to get rid of the bed bugs, we had to rewash everything cloth upstairs. It took about 10 hours at the laundry mats and about $100. Then I stayed up at night folding everything. It was a long process that was made so very discouraged.

That Monday night, after I put away all the kids clothes and made their beds, only Rachel and I slept upstairs.  I was attacked and bitten so bad, I had welts. Then the next night, everyone else slept upstairs and Hannah was also bitten everywhere. It wasn't that the spraying didn't work but that the bugs went into hiding and only got the poison entering out and going back in the hiding places. However, I still called the Bug Guys and they came back to spray. We also bought a frame for our bed and Hannah's bed.  We had to throw out the girl's bunkie-board and just got a wood board to support Hannah's bed instead of box springs.  All our mattress have bed bug covers on except Rachel's.

The amount of bites went down a lot but I wouldn't have said that they are completely gone until just a couple of days ago and we are in May now. We worry a little about the possibility that we could have missed some and will be packing them with us to Laramie but I think this is were trust and faith come in. This was a very difficult challenge and once we found the real problem and were treating it, I prayed a lot that God would bless our efforts and help us be rid of this problem.