It always starts with dead birds — in the movies that is — when a film foreshadows that a killer virus, radiation-poisoning or Erin Brokovich-level of toxic contamination is about to strike in human populations. But when I came home from work one Friday in July, and threw open the French windows in my bedroom for some fresh air, I didn’t really give the rotting baby bird on the window ledge a second thought beyond “oh my god how do I get rid of this smell?” Getting rid of the smell was the easy part — I made someone else do it. I wasn’t sure how long my little feathered friend had been lying on the tiny little ledge, which served as an unstable balcony, outside the window. So I gave the friend, who had a stronger stomach than I, a broom and he pushed the little creature to its final resting place in the weeds/hedge three floors below. Problem solved. Or so I thought.
***
Prior to the dead bird incident, I had noticed one weekend when I laid down for nap that there was a bird’s nest in the little nook next to where the back end of my window unit stuck out. Since my apartment is too big for one air conditioner to do the job, I used the one in my bedroom at night, and the one in my living room if I was around in the daytime. Since I was only in my bedroom at night, when the old, old A/C unit rattled away, I was never able to hear the birds over that racket at night.
***
A couple weeks later when I came home from work on another Friday in July, I started to itch, all over my body, but wasn’t sure why. I had recently switched medications and sometimes in the past that has triggered itching, but there was never any signs of a rash. This time there was — lots of little red bumps. I frantically called my doctor’s after-hours physician to ask if it could be drug related. She said probably not. I called my mom next, and she suspected it was a heat rash since the itchiest spots were around waistbands and where clothing was the tightest. Take a cold shower, take some Benedryl, find some calamine or Benedryl lotion, she said, you’ll be fine.
And it was fine for the rest of the weekend — intermittently — although at one point Sunday night, I had to get off the phone with a friend for a serious itching jag. The red bumps were back and I suspected I was losing my mind. In all of the addiction and mental illness memoirs I had ever read, psychosomatic itching was usually the first symptom of a nervous breakdown. Or a bad reaction to a hallucinogen. In the memoirs, the episode usually ended in a thorazine drip.
I would’ve tried a shower again, but my building’s hot water went out over the weekend. A shower would have to wait. I slathered myself with as much anti-itch lotion as I could find and went to bed with the help of some more Benedryl.
***
I still can’t quite describe the horror I woke up to the next morning, a Monday. Still itching vigorously, I washed my hair in the kitchen sink, thanks to the lack of hot water. After I dried my hair I noticed something tiny — practically microscopic — crawling on my arms. And my ankles. And stomach. And I saw bigger, redder spots on my shins. And that’s when I decided to check my bed linens. I had managed to get through childhood without a lice outbreak, but I knew that sheets had to be all but boiled for de-lousing. Sure enough, I looked at my bed and teeny, tiny black, red and almost translucent flakes of black pepper were crawling on my off-white sheets. They were also on my towels in the bathroom and in my makeup bag.
(It’s a testament to my vanity that I still didn’t abstain from some bare-bones makeup application at this point.)
Half hysterical, I called my parents for advice.
Dad: Go to your Ace store and get the Raid bug bombs in the blue box.
Mom: We’re kind of in the middle of a tornado here in Princeton, Mary, can’t you get a grip. (She apologized profusely later. Hi, Mom!)
Then I sent some frantic emails and IMs to local friends for advice on who to call. Should I call animal control? Pest control? The City of Evanston? The health department? I had no idea.
One friend wrote back: “Here’s the number of my veterinarian, maybe they can help.”
It made perfect sense at the time. Vets deal with fleas and mites every day. At least maybe they could figure out whether what I had was fleas, mites, bed bugs or lice. They had to know.
They had to.
The nice person that answered the phone at the vet clinic said that she could relay my problem to one of the doctors, so I had to do my best to describe the situation without a) seeming like a drug addict in the midst of hallucinations or b) without sounding like I was living in squalor of my own making.
“Hi, I don’t know quite how to explain this, but I’m itchy, have a rash and just found a bunch of what looks like fleas or lice all through my bed linens. I don’t know what to do. A client of yours gave me the number.”
I had a really hard time keeping the giggles at bay — and the person at the other end of the phone was clearly entertained but took me seriously.
“I mean, if you treat cats and dog with fleas, what do you tell their owners to do? Do they ever, um, spread to people?”
I wanted to ask her if I needed a flea dip, but decided to wait and pose that question to the person with a more advanced degree, who she promised would call me back shortly. In the meantime I made sure the local hardware store was open so that I could go get the bug bombs and call the building engineer, whom I was never lucky enough to catch on the first call. However, when you say, “I have bugs everywhere, in my bed, on my body and all over my bedroom,” people tend to call you back in a hurry.
An amused, yet apologetic veterinarian called me back a few minutes later.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, “but we only know how to treat dogs and cats for fleas — not humans. Have you been around a pet or any animals recently?”
I had not. I apologized meekly, laughing really hard at this point about the absurdity of the situation, and told her I’d continue with my bug bomb and exterminator plan. She was sympathetic and really did take me seriously, so I was grateful that she heard me out and didn’t accuse me of making a prank call.
Somewhere in the process of calling people I finally made the connection between the bird nest and the bugs. I didn’t realize yet that the birds in the nest were pigeons — known to exterminators, avian experts and Chicago landlords as “rats with wings” — notorious for their ability to spread disease and mites.
If there’s one thing I learned from this situation, at least in its early stages, it is this: do not, under any circumstances, do a Google image search for mites, fleas, bed bugs, scabies, lice or dermatological conditions. Don’t even think about it.
And, now that I’m starting to itch again just writing this all down, it is, from the blog post that inspired a million puns about birds and bugs, to be continued...
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