Say No To Bugs

A few minutes ago I heard the very, very worst sound in the world: the sound of pigeons cooing. It seems that two of them found a fun little hangout on my bedroom window ledge, just to the left of where their other feathered friends set up their quaint little home last year, on the other side of the window unit. The instant I heard their innocent-seeming noises, I took the pad of paper I was writing on and swatted the bejeezus out of my window until they stubbornly flew away. They were plotting against me, I just know it. Trying to figure out my daily schedule so that they can come back and build a new nest as soon as I'm gone. But I am thwarting their plan. I called the building manager and requested more pigeon spikes. When I get home from my nannying gig, I won't hesitate to get out the anti-pigeon goo and smear it on the ledge. This is war! That is, as soon as I stop itching.

Ain’t No Bugs on Me: Part III

In the spirit of reconciliation and atonement — (last night was the first time I’ve been to confession since I was 13) — I was prepared to make peace with all of pigeonkind, including the nest above the doorway of an apartment two floors below me. The first time I saw the nest back in January, I contemplated calling Vasco again to see about removal. But, it was in the middle of a long winter and I didn’t want to render two proud pigeon parents childless yet again. 

Besides, I had noticed that someone got rid of the initial nest, leaving the eggs unattended for what I thought was a fatal length of time. When I saw the nest had been re-built I was kind of touched to find the parents tending to it again. When I asked an uncle, a bird expert of sorts, about the eggs’ chances for survival, he said the odds were low that baby birds would result. The pigeon parents, however, would be just as likely to tend to marbles as they would viable eggs.

But no such luck. Before long, the eggs hatched. I couldn’t very well ask for the nest’s destruction at this point. That would mean committing avian infanticide. So I kept my mouth shut as long as I could. As the babies grew, the nest started to fall apart and scatter all over the landing. Also, four pigeons means four times the pigeon poo, which for a tiny space is a lot of poo. Getting the situation solved took three phone calls and a lot of psychosomatic itching. But at least it’s gone and I remain guilt-free.

So, back to last summer.

After three days of getting nowhere on the extermination and delousing front, I took up residence at a Fairfield Inn where the bed linens were gloriously white and free from the creepy crawlies. If there were any residual mites left on me or my clothing, I would surely find them on the spotless sheets and commence killing. After finding out that the skin infection I had, called impetigo, wasn’t contagious, I went back to work as usual.

Having not heard from my building’s management for days at this point, I started calling all the departments in Cook County and the city of Evanston that I thought might be able to intercede. After a couple calls, I was able to determine that this could easily be considered a public health issue and went from there. The kind man who answered my call at the Health Dept. said he’d call management and see that it got taken care of.

Within minutes the building manager got back to me after three days of missed calls, and agreed to pay for half of the time spent in the hotel; for a cleaning service to come in; the doctor and drug bills; the cost of cleaning supplies; the cost of laundering all of my clothing, bed linens, futon cover, throw rugs and blankets; as well as the cosmetics, toiletries and pillows that I had to replace.

After that, everything rapidly started to improve. Giddy with relief, I was able to find a nice cleaning service that could thoroughly remove all traces of dead mite exoskeletons and remnants my Raid foggers. Then my mom, God bless her, came up to Evanston to help me with the laundry nightmare that was stuffing every stitch of fabric in my apartment into a front-loading washing machine at my dilapidated neighborhood laundromat — a feat that cost $40 in quarters.

But before the professionals came in to clean, my mom and I donned masks and charged into my apartment to bag up my clothes and vacuum what we could with our Shop-Vac. We were chagrined to find that while the building engineer dutifully removed my two window A/C units for cleaning, he neglected to put up anything to cover the open window left behind, leaving god knows what to fly in and wreak bird havoc in my already ravaged apartment. I ended up taping a street map of Chicago over one empty window and a piece of cardboard over the other. Exhausted after our cleaning binge, we returned to the hotel and its pristine white sheets and retired for the night.

The next morning we got up early so we could let the cleaning service in and then resigned ourselves to the laundromat for what turned out to be about 14 loads of laundry. We ran a shockingly efficient operation, shuffling loads between the washers and dryers and making polite small talk with the homeless people that wander in and out of the facility all day. By noon, we were done with the laundry just in time to pay the cleaning service.

The hard part, now, was keeping my paranoia at bay while I got used to life without bugs.

I vacuumed every inch of my mattress and furniture and invested in a Dustbuster in case I ever had trouble telling the difference between lint and mites. Still traumatized, it took me three nights to work up the nerve to actually sleep in my bed. I was convinced that the mites had all laid eggs in the mattress and that hatching was imminent. Then, it was weeks before I could get into bed without giving my sheets a good once-over. I briefly considered buying a magnifying glass for this purpose.

In another exercise in paranoia, I asked the building manager to install pigeon spikes outside all of my windows. Through a little online research I learned that pigeons prefer to roost on ledges on a building’s top floor, and especially on ledges facing a courtyard, which mine did. Since I knew it could be a few days until the landlord got around to doing it, I bought what I can only describe as anti-pigeon goo. This concoction is designed to burn the feet of any pigeon that chooses to land on a surface covered with it. It only bothers me a little bit that I have no reservations about being this vigilant.

Thus far, my paranoia has paid off as my apartment has been spared from any further infestations. However, this is just the first step in my crusade against infestation. I will not rest until I see pigeon spikes on every ledge of my building. And my neighbors will thank me. Oh, how they will thank me.

Ain’t No Bugs On Me: Part 2

Just prior to penning the first installment of my pigeon problem, my pigeon paranoia resurfaced when I noticed that an apartment two floors below mine had a pigeon nest above the back door. All of the other units in my part of the building have a similar ledge above the door too, but the rest, except for this one unit’s, are screened off. This is prime pigeon real estate; it’s still facing a courtyard that pigeons love, but it’s out of the wind.

I first noticed it one day when I started climbing my stairs only to find mama and papa pigeon trading places, which involved flying right over my head in the narrow stairwell, as they tended to the nest and eggs. I’m pretty sure I hit the deck while they swooped in and out. A day or two later, the remnants of the nest were on the stairway, where it looked like someone, smartly, tried to get rid of it. But pigeons are nothing if not persistent, and the nest was reassembled a couple days later.

Ever since, every time I enter or leave the building I have to come face to face with a pigeon. And I know what they’re thinking: “That’s the girl that had our last nest destroyed. Home wrecker! Let’s dive bomb her!”

Their beedy little eyes are full of loathing. Of that I’m certain.

But back to the first pigeon crisis.

On that rainy Monday morning where we left off, I made a run to the local Ace store frantically in search of bug bombs. I got back home just as the building engineer, Vasco, got there. He helped me identify them vaguely as “bird mites.” I had to vacate for a few hours while the bug bombs took effect, so I called in for a personal day from work and rounded up some things and took refuge at my sister’s, where I finally was able to take a shower. I made sure the water was as hot as I could tolerate and scrubbed and shampooed until I felt bug and itch free.

Vasco had promised me he’d call an exterminator in case the bombs didn’t finish the job and get rid of the nest. Despite numerous calls to Vasco throughout the day, I was not able to get through to him to find out the status of the bug bombs or to find out if the exterminator had been there yet. At that point I started looking in the yellow pages for exterminators to see if I could find someone who could at least tell me what the protocol was — did I need to boil and wash all my bed linens, clothes, rugs, furniture? Would the chemicals from the bombs and exterminator be harmful? And then, how to deal with the millions of dead bug carcasses after the fogger kicked in? Nobody could tell me. And Vasco was nowhere to be found.

I eventually decided Monday night to go back to my apartment, gather up enough clothes and necessities for a couple days, and stay at my sister’s, or somewhere else, until I could get in and do a thorough cleaning.

I entered through the back door, which has an outer screen door, and another door with a window. Immediately I noticed broken glass on the steps and saw a big triangular corner knocked out of the window. Flabbergasted and more than a tad upset, I called Vasco again, and finally got ahold of him. He was very apologetic and apologized for accidentally breaking my window with a hammer when he’d been there earlier. Still livid, I did a walk-through to evaluate whether there were any bugs left that were moving.

For the most part, everything was pretty much dead, though one or two were still crawling here and there. I rounded up another batch of clothes, which I was instructed to put in the dryer. Supposedly, the heat of a dryer would kill anything left on the fabric.

A friend told me I could stay at her place with her roommates since she was out of town, so I packed for the next night or two and went over to her place. But in the process of carrying my clothes down to her washer and dryer in the basement, some sort of giant beetle attached itself to my tee-shirt without my knowing it (to get to the basement, I had to go outside). With my clothes safely dried, I parked myself on their couch in front of the TV to unwind. But shortly after I sat down I felt something stinging me, like a bee-sting, on my lower back. I jumped up and found that huge, grayish/brown beetle and screamed. I decided to flee again to my sister’s for the night.

I had never particularly bug phobic — I stayed in Girl Scouts until I was in high school for crying out loud — but that day did me in.

I stayed with my sister for two nights as I was again playing phone tag with Vasco. It had taken him 2-3 days to get an exterminator over to fog and spray the place, and I told them I wouldn’t be back until they got rid of the offending nest. This, I didn’t realize, is a little controversial in the exterminating world. Some exterminators said spraying the nest would kill any remnants of bugs. However, the act of throwing it away could result in throwing all the bug exoskeletons into the air, which could be harmful to asthmatics or people with breathing problems. I asked Vasco to have the exterminator call me so I could ask him how to clean thoroughly and to find out exactly what kinds of mites I was dealing with (nobody seemed to know for sure).

By the third or fourth day of not hearing back from Vasco, my mom told me to go stay in a hotel out of courtesy to my sister. At this point the red bumps on my legs developed into irritated sores so I started calling doctors. One doctor I reached told me that whatever I had could be extremely contagious and that I shouldn’t be at work and should cancel the business trip I was scheduled to go on. I opted to go to an urgent care facility for a diagnosis since I didn’t want to wait for an appointment. I learned that I just had a skin infection, which was not contagious. I did not, the verynice doctor promised, have the scabies-like infection I was afraid I had. Oral and topical antibiotics would take care of it.

I had given up on getting ahold of Vasco and started calling management instead. I wanted to make sure the nest was gone and that my window units would get a thorough cleaning. I also wanted compensation for the hotel, doctor’s visit and belongings I had to replace as a result of this mess.

However, nobody called me back…until I called the Evanston health department.

To be continued….

Ain’t No Bugs On Me: Part 1

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...