Theresa Braine

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

Slowly I started to settle into my new digs. It wasn’t automatic. I was still in shock. I was still trying to wrap my head around the reality that, freshly returned from the so-called developing world to a supposedly advanced country, I had been run out of house and home by a bunch of bugs.

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

I succeeded in extracting myself from the formerly bed-bugged apartment on a sunny Sunday in June 2010. Having baked or sealed with insecticide strips every single possession (and given or thrown away bags upon bags of treated stuff), I had fled to my parents’ place, loath to bring anything, including myself, directly to my new apartment despite all precautions.

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

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

Watching Arnold’s mover friends shake and bump his furniture around the hallway outside my apartment was disconcerting. Waking up on Easter with two bites was even more so. 

“I’ll hold off paying rent until I see if I get any more bites,” I told Rocco, the landlord.

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

I spent the better part of March deciding whether to exit before or after I got a job. With no funds, I didn’t have many options. I contemplated moving in with my parents. But I felt that would be admitting defeat, officially putting the stamp of failure on my return from a seven-year stint in Mexico.