Producer Robyn Semien
Appearances
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
Though Stephanie agreed to talk to me, at first she didn't want to invite me inside her apartment. She and her husband and five-year-old daughter never have guests over, and haven't for years because of the bed bugs. Like Miss M, she asks that we not give her real name. Her kid's got to go to school, and she's got to deal with moms who might hear this on the radio.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
So that's why I'm calling her Stephanie. Her sleep is interrupted all the time by bedbugs, by the full-grown ones that are brown and easy to spot, and the babies that are just little white specks.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
The bedbugs didn't take over the building overnight. Like many of the residents, they've been there for years, locked in a tug of war, where sometimes the residents are winning and sometimes it's the bugs. When the bugs arrived, Stephanie's daughter was just two and started waking up in the middle of the night scratching and crying.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
Stephanie and her husband moved her to a different room and pretty soon had to relocate themselves, too, out of their own bedroom to sleep on an air mattress in the living room. This was a complete failure. The bugs followed. It turns out, Stephanie says, they'd simply moved the bugs' food source, the food source being them, and it drove her crazy.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
Stephanie and her husband exterminated. They bought their own pesticides. They put all of their clothes, sheets, towels, pillows, and all of their daughter's toys in clean plastic bags and lived out of the plastic bags. They threw out half the books they owned and then vacuumed the bugs out of each page of the books they kept. Put them in plastic bags.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
They coated the legs of their beds in Vaseline because Stephanie read somewhere that the bed bugs couldn't climb on Vaseline. They couldn't afford to move. Lately, it seems to be working. And when you visit their apartment, you can't tell anything's wrong. It's clean. It's neat.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
And when I ask Stephanie if I might see a bed bug somewhere, she doesn't seem sure, but says we might find a stray in the couch she's sitting on. It has dark brown cushions and a dark wood frame, and it's sentimental to Stephanie and her husband, the first piece of furniture they bought when they moved in together.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
A few years ago, to save it from the bed bugs, Stephanie's husband replaced the foam and reupholstered it himself.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
She squats by the couch and starts to pull at the corner of the seat cushion. Oh.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
You are a pro, I see nothing. No, you will, right here. To me it doesn't look like much. Like brown dust or tobacco that's come out of a cigarette. And some white powder mixed in.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
A few years ago, Stephanie decided to do an experiment to see how long the bedbugs could live without food, without feeding on her family. She found two baby bedbugs and kept them in a sealed plastic deli container on her windowsill. Months passed, and instead of dying, they bred. She'd grown a colony of bedbugs and an apartment of bedbugs and a building of bedbugs.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
She ended up tossing the whole thing out. Because she could. And because she was scared they might find a way to escape.