I called an exterminator the next morning.
$790 for a full treatment.
Three weeks later bites again.
I called a second company. Different chemicals. $640.
Three weeks later bites again.
I went back online. This time I wasn't searching for what the bites were.
I was searching for why treatments kept failing.
And I found the answer that nobody not the exterminators, not the doctors, not anyone, had ever told me.
By the time most people discover a bed bug infestation, the colony has already moved inside the walls.
Bed bugs don't just live on your mattress.
They live inside wall voids. Behind electrical outlets. Deep inside furniture joints. In the structural spaces beneath your floors.
A spray treatment can only reach the bugs it can physically touch.
The colony living inside your walls?
Completely untouched. Every single time.
And here's what made my situation even worse.
Because my infestation went undiagnosed for four months while three doctors were prescribing me steroid cream and telling me to meditate the colony had four months to establish itself deep inside my home's structure.
By the time I even knew what I was dealing with, I wasn't fighting a surface infestation.
I was fighting a fully entrenched structural colony.
No wonder two exterminators had failed.
They were treating the 40% they could see.
The other 60% was living somewhere their spray would never reach.