Theresa Braine

Bedbugged! is a weekly column by journalist and bed bug survivor Theresa Braine. For more, click here.

Over the months that my apartment was afflicted with bed bugs, I found myself talking about them incessantly. This was understandable from one standpoint, since for a time bed bugs was all that was happening to me.

Bedbugged! is a weekly column by journalist and bed-bug survivor Theresa Braine. For more, click here.

When bed bugs were found in the desk of a courthouse employee last year, her misfortune was broadcast in the New York media. 

What was less known was that she lived in a coveted neighborhood, in a rent-stabilized building that was saturated with bed bugs, according to tenants and a savvy pest-control operator (PCO) with whom I have spoken about the place. 

Bedbugged! is a weekly column by journalist and bed-bug survivor Theresa Braine. For more, click here.

I don’t quite remember how all of my nearest and dearest reacted when I first told them my apartment (that's right, my apartment, not me) had bed bugs. My father recalled what sounded like a pretty bad infestation in the 1940s, when he was a kid, right before both my parents launched into the tale of a friend of theirs who had battled them for months.