The Pox

Day 6.  It feels worse than it looks.

...or so we thought, until the itching began:


June 14, 2011
 

“Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite!”

Until a couple of years ago, the brutal reality of these traditional parting words seemed as unlikely to me as the darker interpretations of “Rock-a-bye Baby” or “Ring Around the Rosie”--just as no modern mother would even dream of sticking her baby's cradle in the branches of a tree, bed bugs seemed as mythically distant as the Black Death, just a nursery-rhyme relic of a by-gone era.  Even when I heard news of a new generation of bed bugs rising from the grave and the persisting outbreak in New York City, even infesting the apartments of some of my closest friends, I hardly thought it would ever hit me personally.

On Day 3 of trying to cheerfully ignore my discomfort and expecting it to fade away, it finally dawned on me that it really could be bedbugs.  Thanks to the Italian train drivers' strike we'd arrived back in Leipzig early in the morning 8 hours behind schedule and completely exhausted, stripped to our skivvies, and crashed on the pull-out futon, leaving our unopened suitcases in the middle of the floor.  I do an image google and find page after page of pics that look just like the long lines of delicate raised spots traced across my shoulders.  Googling deeper, page after page of bedbug advice: identification, treatment, prevention, etc.  Reading in English, I notice that many of the texts contain some odd turns of phrase and a quirky sense of humor that makes me curious about the author: I scroll down to the bottom of the text: “By Abeer Gupta”  Next page: “By Padmal Malhotra.”  Next: “By Indrajit Bhatnagar.”  India.  Of course India.  That's why I've never been to India: I'm a wuss. I'd never make it out alive. 

Flashback to the hostel in Verona and the check-in card that kept sticking to the bottom of my foot in the dorm room where I stayed.  Someone had lost their check-in card and it kept ending up on the floor in front of my bed.  The name on the card: Kalyani Banerji.  But Kalyani Banerji was gone, there was a different girl in the top bunk every night, Flemish, Canadian, Japanese, but where was Kalyani, and was she a walking bed bug delivery service? 

I call my friend Laura in NYC.  “Your bed bugs came from an infestation directly in your apartment, right?” I ask.  “They were in the whole building?”  “No, no,” she answers, “I got them in my suitcase from a luggage rack.  The plane had just come back from India.”  I sprang into panicked action.  “Don't worry,” she said.  “Just put everything in the dryer on the hottest setting.”  “Germans don't have dryers,” I answered, “They think they're wasteful and decadent.”  “So, you seriously can't find somebody who has a dryer?”   My mind whizzed through a list of possible candidates, and I heaved a deep sigh,“I think it'd take at least a week, and I need to act faster than that.  Even if I found a laundromat, I'd have to wait another two days until the end of the 4-day Pentacost weekend, and I don't exactly want to try calling everyone I know and asking to use their place to de-infest my stuff.”  I quickly convert the highest setting on my washing machine from Celsius to Fahrenheit--90°C = 194°F--and call my mom, a hospital manager in the states with some bed bug experience of her own.  “Anything over 100°F should do the trick,” she says.  “You could even tie everything up in trashbags and leave it on the roof to heat up for a few days.”  I glance out the window at our neighbors's steeply pitched roof, a mirror image of our own, and realize that's not an option.

36 hours and 5 steamy loads of laundry later, it's still a public holiday in Germany and everything is still closed.  I've already been to the Notdienstapotheke (emergency pharmacy, open when the others aren’t) and found little-to-no relief from the antihistimine and very weak hydrocortisone cream they'd sent me home with.  My boyfriend is starting to itch, too, with bumps identical to mine.  After days of calling me a hypocondriac, he starts boasting of his “solidarity spots.”  The last night we'd stayed in the hostel I'd met his new roommate, a good-looking guy--named Raja.  It's Day 5 for me, and our apartment looks like that of a careless cokehead, a thin film of coarse, white dust covers every surface.  Some of it is baking soda, some baking power (when I'd run out of soda), some chopped up aspirin tablets.  Following the home remedies recommended online, I'd mixed each of these products into a paste and smeared them on my skin.  They all offered a mild degree of relief (although the baking powder fizzed like crazy and quickly formed itself into little mini-icebergs, which I stubbornly crushed against the welts), until they crumbled away onto the carpet, sofa, coffee table, drying laundry, etc.

Around 1 a.m. on Tuesday, Day 6, the thought of waiting another 7 hours to see my GP when her practice opens at 8 a.m. makes want to hack my arms off.  Feverish fantasies of an itch-free, armless life float through my mind. I pace around the rooms, splashing cold water on my skin, wrapping myself in frozen dish towels, wimpering in desperation.  As I try to get to sleep I start to realize that the spots are growing and spreading—my jaw line itches, my earlobe, my knuckles.  My arms and shoulders look like the rind of a baked ham.  I imagine taking a cab to the emergency room, arguing with the nurses to let me in, forking over the extra holiday fee, sitting for unbearable hours in a waiting area doubling as a drunk tank, only to finally be seen by an overworked ER doc who's used to stitching up hands sliced open in barroom brawls and setting bones cracked in moped accidents, but doesn't have a clue about mysterious rashes.

At the end of a sleepless night, I dress at dawn and pace around some more until 7 a.m. when I walk to my GP's office around the corner.  I know I'm too early, but I don't know what else to do with myself.  I stand directly in front of the praxis door, bracing my burning arms against my chest and trying not to think about the new spots on my face.  By 8:30 I've been referred to a specialist across town and sent off with a note to get out of work for the rest of the week.

Waiting at the dermatologist's office, the sight of my own reflection in the bathroom mirror makes me burst into tears of pure shock and misery: I look like a 16-century Franciscan's illustration of a Native American dying of smallpox.  I imagine a tilda-shaped codex speech bubble painted in red brushstroke—what's the Aztec word for “MOAN...!”?  There are four new pea-sized lumps on my right cheekbone alone.  I ache with both self-pity and flaccid post-colonial compassion—back in those infectious days, bed bugs were the least of a person's problems.  I oughtta suck it up.  But all around me in the waiting room the other patients are cheerfully anticipating their varicose vein and cellulite treatments, brochures for cosmetic dermabrasion and electrolysis smile back at me in blond perfection while my whole body continues to burn and swell.  What the fuck.

I finally go to the nurse's desk and make a scene, pacing and scratching and begging her for something to smear on myself while I wait my turn.  My voice is weak and hoarse from agony and lack of sleep, I can barely keep from sobbing.  I'm politely ushered into the blood work room, where I sit alone for another 45 minutes.  A nurse come in and draws three vials of my blood; I'm too exhausted to ask her what it's for.  The doctor comes in and takes a quick look at me, smoldering in my chair.  “Do you have hay fever?” she asks.  “No,” I sniffle meekly, “Just crying.”  “There, there,” she says soothingly, “It's only Nesselsucht,” and disappears again.  I've heard the term Nesselsucht before and have a vague idea of what it is, but it's not a comforting thought.  I try to translate it in my head...Nettle-searching?  Nettle-addiction?  My body's addicted to nettles?  I've never been stung by a nettle that made me look like a medical textbook freak.  Hours later I check the dictionary and find the translation I should've figured out already: hives.  And really fucking bad ones, at that.

I'm dressed in the only things I could find that were soft, loose, and lightweight, easy to remove, and not among the clothes I'd had with me on vacation (which are now all boiled and quarrantined in plastic bags).  I'd taken off my cardigan for the bloodwork and can't stand to pull it on again, my arms and shoulders are bare outside my tank top.  The glass door to the room is propped open and nurses and other patients come in and out to pick up medications from the fridge.  I watch their stunned expressions as they try not to stare at my blistery skin.  Once the doctor sees me I'm diagnosed with a severe allergic reaction to...hmm...bed bugs, perhaps?  I take my prescriptions to be filled at the pharmacy downstairs, and the young woman behind the counter says she recognizes my characteristic welts from her travels to India.  “Oh ja, I've had those, too,” she says.  “Don't worry, they go away... eventually.”

With that small comfort I go home and plant myself on the couch again.  The news reports of the nuclear referendum in Italy and Berlusconi's continuing shenanigans make my skin crawl—as if Berlusconi hadn't always made my skin crawl already.  A glance at the binding of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice on my bookshelf gives the title a horrific new significance—it was just after we'd come back from a day trip to Venice last Thursday that the rash started, innocuously enough, and now I feel like death.  Through my itchy delirium I regret that I can't go back to work until next week, if not later.  I was looking forward to seeing my students and colleagues, to being relaxed and happy and full of funny anecdotes about our adventures in Italy.  A week of empty days at home yawns before me.  With two cortisone creams, two cortisone tablets, and an antihistamine keeping the itching down to a slightly more bearable level, and with the doctor's reassurance that I'm not contagious—even if I look lethal--I decide to go the library and find some books and DVDs to keep me distracted. 

I don one of the few long-sleeved items I own to cover the multitude of now fingerprint-sized welts, and thank whatever-it-is-out-there-that-I-should-thank that we're having a relatively cool summer.  Walking down the street, feeling the heat rising from my wounds and incubating under my sweater, I dream of somewhere cold and clean, rivers of mountain water, somewhere known for freshness...like the Alps...Wait, I was just there...that's how this whole thing started!  Fuck!!!  My mind ricochets off opposites with a universal revulsion toward places starting with “I”: Italy, India, Indonesia, Illinois.  Even home-sweet-homes fail to comfort—Iwate Prefecture, in northeast Japan, where I spent a semester abroad: earthquake, fire, tsunami, radiation...*scratch scratch scratch*   Indiana: upcoming visit in August, hot, muggy, buggy, the image of me in my best friend's wedding, decked out in formal wear, leperous skin peeking out from a sweetheart neckline in photo after photo.  I can't even stand to wear a bra right now--what if there's crinoline involved?  Silent groan...*scratch scratch scratch*

At the library, the selection is not easy.  The mere sight of  The Bollywood Fanbook sends tortured shivers down my spine. The same goes for Tuscan Cooking.  Not to mention The Pope and Lord of the Flies.  I'm usually a sucker for historical fiction in exotic locales, stories of trials and tribulations, but I'm not in the mood for desert oases or Middle Age tales today.  Just the thought of an illuminated painting or a renaissance palace reminds me of an eloquent German metaphor I picked up recently: “Man kann auch Läuse und Flöhe haben”--“It's possible to have both lice and fleas.”  No thanks, bed bugs are enough for me.

Next stop is the drugstore, where I can finally buy some jumbo-sized garbage bags to quarrantine our suitcases and suffocate any stowaway bugs, now that the holiday weekend is over and the shops are open again.  A seductive glance at the jewellery rack in the store is interrupted by shadowy threats of a nickel allergy; I turn on my heels and head straight to the check-out counter.  Swerving around strolling shoppers on the way home I fantasize about having a maid to run my errands for me, to cook and clean and leave me sprawled on the couch ready to receive pampering.  But who has that kind of money?  Who has a maid?  Other than my Nepali friend, Mona, of course, with the family cook in Kathmandu who runs their household...wouldn't that be nice...a maid...in Nepal...wait—Nepal?  They have bed bugs, too! NO!!!!  Nepal...Naples...Napoli...I pass a sign for an Italian vegetable market...Italy...bed bugs...NOOOO!!!

When I get home, my not-quite-equally-suffering boyfriend greets me at the door and proudly announces that he's prepared dinner: rice with homemade apple chutney.  For him.  I've never liked chutney.  But he made something for me, too: pizza.

The above is a true story.  Names have been changed to protect the possibly guilty.  The author is aware that bed bugs can turn up just about anywhere and that many travel accommodations all over the world and in all price classes are infested and is not pointing any fingers.  But again, this is a true story.