A bedbug like none other

A couple of days after coming home from a holiday, my husband and I wondered why our nights were restless and we often woke up several times in the night feeling itchy all over. We put it down to the hot weather, and I decided to change the sheets. Imagine my horror when I saw reddish-brown bugs scurrying about under the sheet. I had never seen bedbugs before but guessed immediately what they were. Then we started our war against them. They were resistant to all kinds of insecticides, and even though we sunned the mattress and cot for days, they did not go. Finally, my husband dismantled the cot and discovered eggs in all the joints! They had to be torched with burning paper rolls before they finally said goodbye. 

During our holiday, we stayed one night in a jungle guest house in the middle of the forest. Probably the bed there was infested, and we had carried the bugs in our luggage and deposited them home. 

It was a nightmarish experience trying to get rid of the bugs, and I had imagined that they would never go away. 

Then the other day, I found myself wide awake at 4:45 am, as my cat Odie had woken me up. Then I spotted a small insect on the bed next to me and instinctively squashed it. I expected it to get up and crawl away, as insects don’t generally get squashed on a soft surface. The size and shape made my heart sink. It definitely wasn’t a mosquito. It looked roundish and flat, like a tick or bedbug. It was still on the mattress, and I pressed it again to make sure it was really dead. Then I put on my specs and switched on my mobile torch to examine it properly. 

And my heart sank. It was reddish brown in colour and flat, like a tick or bedbug. I pried it off the bed with a bookmark and tried to turn it over on another bookmark to see its legs, but I couldn’t see any. But it was exuding a sticky substance, and I couldn’t turn it over. So I placed it between the bookmarks on the table by the bed, first poking it hard with a hairpin in case it was still alive and crawled away later. I placed a bottle of water on the bookmarks.

I couldn’t sleep, so I began to read about bedbugs and how to distinguish them from ticks and how to tell them from eight other bugs that look like bedbugs but aren’t.

Then I got up to brush my teeth. My reflection in the mirror looked slightly different. Something was missing, and I laughed in relief when I realised what the mystery bug was! Yes, it was my bindi!