My life is a circus and I have a tent to prove it! It has been a little crazy lately. My beloved was a wonderful man. He could leap tall buildings, fix anything, reverse engineer or design engineer almost anything. I’m not exaggerating, he was a genius and had the IQ scores to prove it. He would give you the shirt off his back and had literally done so on at least two occasions I can recall. But, ah yes the but! He could not say no! Even when it caused his death. A close friend and former mentor had a heart attack and it turns out he was a hoarder. This could have been filmed for a reality show. The hoarders’ adult daughter called and pleaded for help. Mind you she had her family, her husband, her church, her father’s church and many friends in town. We lived over an hour away. But hey, she knew this close friend who could perform miracles and who wouldn’t say no….
My beloved should have been in intensive care with a fatal case of pneumonia. He was resting at home because he feared and hated hospitals. She knew this, you could hear it in his voice and as he coughed up liquid.
The call came and he went on Friday. I went with him on Saturday and Sunday and helped toss over a ton of belongings into a roll off dumpster. I begged, I cried, I watched him bend over and cough out water from his lungs. He came home Sunday night, could not get out of bed Monday and died on Tuesday morning. He was 52.
I do not bear her ill will, I am not angry with her, I think I have forgiven her, I may have to again, but I am not ready to talk to her yet. Maybe when the circus has left town and I can find some balance in my life again. Maybe these relationships just need to gently fade into the past with the pain as time goes by.
It has been one year and I have been fighting the bugs that came home with him all this time. The cockroaches were easy to kill, the silverfish a little harder but not impossible. The bed bugs won. Until I declared nuclear war and called in the fumigators. Food had to be removed and frozen. Anything taken out of the house had to be frozen or heated to over 130 degrees. We had to find homes for our three cats and ourselves for a week. My adult daughter is spending a few months with me to help me with the chaos of my life. We are both chemically sensitive and Vikane gas with a Tear Gas precursor is a very nasty chemical cocktail. It kills EVERYTHING! We have tossed and replaced one mattress and one box springs and had to destroy a lot of food that we either missed or just wouldn’t make the transfers. The tent alone cost $2,640. and other costs are still mounting. The biggest cost has been the life of my husband so the material possessions pale in comparison.
Clean, toss out, reorganize, sanitize…boxes and bags everywhere. I think it is the residue from the tear gas that is giving us sore throats and sore nasal cavities. It is better after washing all the bedding. The hundreds of little black bodies all over the house…who knew how many house flies and spiders we really had, even after a grocery store type of chemical bombing. The vacuum is busy and so are my daughter and myself!
My advice to you, say no when it is appropriate! Take care of your own health first! Regift, REDUCE, reuse, recycle! And so very important to avoid some of this mess….go to Wal-Mart and buy mattress and pillow cases for bed bugs. Put your box spring, your mattress and every bed pillow in the house in one! Strip all bedding, including the blankets, off your beds after visitors and wash and/or at least heat up in the dryer.
The folks at Clark Pest Control have been as wonderful as they could possibly be. They were very aggressive with the process (a good thing) and their sales person, Vincent, called me almost daily during the process. Sometimes three and four times a day. Now that I have “come clean” about my experience, others are confessing their own stories and what we have is an epidemic of bed bugs, especially areas that do not freeze over. Think about it….someone will pay the consequences of our actions, maybe not ourselves, but someone will.
Fumigation Tent
Tessa Bertoldi 