Ok - It's war

A bit over a month ago, we purchased my dream home. Nice big house with nice big yard and a nice happy neighborhood. We got fair deal on the house and started sleeping in the house about a month ago.

The only thing that troubled me when buying the house is that we bought the house from 2 dirka families living in it with 10 children in the house and many suitcases in the basement. There must have been some sort of immigration/consulting/people smuggling/who-knows ring going on in that house.

Bah, it's no big deal; after all, this is a modern, common living get-up here in the Toronto Mississauga area in Canada. We're buying the house - not the people living in it. Right?

So we took our time moving in and two weeks after sleeping peacefully, I noticed that I woke up with these strange lumps.. about 3 in a row or so in my rib area. My skin was pink in the area. I didn't think much of it and brushed them off as some sort of spider bite.

After a few more days, I got two more or so on my back. I brushed these off as more bites or possibly pimples.

After a few more days, I noticed that I got these small bites on my side close to the first bites. These were less sever. I just dismissed these as small pimples that I scratched off.

After a few more days, my wounds started to heal and the heart of the bites actually showed dark red. 1, 2, 3 in a row. I said to my wife 'you know, It's almost like something was crawling on me, bit me, moved over, bit me again, then moved over, and bit me again.'

Another few days passed and last weekend I attended a wedding. It had an open bar and I got pretty tipsy. We got home and I went to bed. I woke up when I got sober and was real thirsty. I also woke up with my bite marks burning. I thought this was because I was dehydrated. I then stayed up for 30 min and went back to sleep.

As I was trying to get back to sleep I began to think about my wounds and realized it has been almost 2 weeks and I have these mysterious bites on me that are burning and healing very slowly. I went back to sleep. That night I drempt of spiders and insects that were out to get me.

I awoke the next morning and grabbed the laptop and started to research spider bites. After all, there was quite a bit of spiders around the house when we moved in so it must have been spiders. As I was researching a site, I saw this one line:

"Spiders rarely bite more than once, so multiple bites are usually caused by insects such as fleas, bedbugs, ticks, mites and biting flies."

As soon as I read the part about the bedbugs, I automatically had this sinking feeling. Then I read this about bedbug bites:

"Though bedbug bites can occur singly, they often follow a distinctive pattern of a linear group of three bites, sometimes macabrely referred to as "breakfast, lunch and dinner."

Ok. Now I had confirmation that I indeed had bedbugs. I then found some sites related to bedbugs and those trying to cope:

http://bedbugblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.savejeffy.com/
http://ridiculouschick.blogspot.com/2005/12/closure.html

After further reading, I realized this would need ongoing professional intervention over a long period of time. Naturally as a guy, I want to try to tackle this myself. If we can't spray DDT all over the house, this won't go away easily; regardless of professional help. With a new house and new payments, I can't afford to pay people to spray pesticides that I can buy at the store and spray myself.

I'm waging war. The War is starting now.