Bedbug Tale: One Family's Horror Story

FORT COLLINS, Colo. (Sept. 4) --Jennifer Burkhart lived with her husband and four young children on a quiet suburban street. But they had a secret. A secret so worrisome they told only family and a few select friends.

They had bedbugs.

Concerned that their children would be shunned if their friends knew, they arranged play dates and birthday parties outdoors.

"We took every precaution," Burkhart told AOL News. "It was one of those summers where they were pretty much alone."

Bedbug infestations make the headlines daily -- a movie theater closed in New York City, the schools shut in Bracken County, Ky., library books destroyed in Denver, hotels infested in San Francisco -- yet these stories fail to convey the personal toll inflicted by the problem.

For Burkhart, the bedbugs meant the loss of treasured heirlooms from her grandparents and father, concern over her family's exposure to the extermination chemicals and $30,000 in expenses that depleted her children's college fund.

"It was devastating. There was no place to go for assistance," she said. "It was kind of like being the victim of a flood and not having flood insurance. You have to sift through it and survive and rebuild."

Burkhart's nightmare began in February 2008, when the family went to scenic Estes Park, Colo., in Rocky Mountain National Park, for her daughter's district swim meet. They stayed for two nights at the same national chain hotel where they stayed every year. The first morning, her eldest daughter awoke with welts on her arms and legs.

"We were wondering if it was hives," Burkhart recalled, but later in the day when they saw the girl in her bathing suit, they noticed the welts had formed into round, itchy bites.

"Other than the fable, we never really knew bedbugs existed. It was the furthest thing from our minds," Burkhart recalled.

After the family returned home, Burkhart and her husband started getting bites. They wondered if the new puppy had fleas and used a chemical fogger in their bedroom, to no avail.

"We lived with it for about a month, trying to figure out what was going on," she said. "Finally, it just dawned on us. We flipped the mattress and saw a stained area."

She remembered the mysterious bites from Estes Park, and since the suitcases were stored in the master bedroom closet, it followed that her bedroom was the center of activity. The bugs had gotten into everything in the closet and master bathroom. They had spread to other rooms in the 3,000-square-foot home, traveling on Burkhart's pillow to the living room and family room couches when she had a restless night.

After failed attempts to treat the bugs themselves, they called commercial exterminators and went through three before they found one that knew how to deal with the insects. The company looked under baseboards with mirrors, inspected ceilings and pulled off faceplates.

And the Burkharts purged. All bedding, drapes, pictures, clothes, books and toiletries were removed from the master bedroom. Everything was taken out of the desk, and eventually the desk itself was tossed because the paper-thin bedbugs had gotten into the cracks. The carpet from the master bedroom was torn up and thrown out. They filled three huge commercial trash bins with the belongings.

"Our new mattress -- I loved that mattress -- but it was gone," Burkhart said. "They say you can encase them in plastic, but at that point there was no way we were going to take chances."

More painful than the loss of the mattress was the loss of her late father's chair.

"There was no way of treating that chair to be sure they'd be gone," she said. "It was a keepsake. I held my babies in that chair. It was a big chair for us to lose. "

In the living room and family room, attempts to treat the three-month-old couches failed, and they were thrown out, as well as the two brand-new TV sets. Only one of the two computers was salvaged.

Still, despite their problems, Burkhart said they were lucky that the bedbugs didn't spread to more rooms via the family pets. Of the four children, ages 4 to 11 that summer, only the 9-year-old lost belongings, because her bedroom shared a common wall with her parents. "She lost all of her things," her mother said.

"We would put things in plastic bins, and we'd try to bake them in the sun," Burkhart explained. High heat -- 130 degrees or more -- can kill the bugs and eggs.

Eventually, some belongings were stored in plastic bins, taped shut and put into storage. Since adult bedbugs can live for 18 months without feeding, the Burkharts have only just begun removing those items.

With few belongings in the house, the family resorted to sleeping on inflatable mattresses in the bare living room. There were daily rituals: sheets went into the dryer for at least 90 minutes to kill any bedbugs that might be on them, showers before leaving the house to eliminate any '"hitchhikers" and an inspection for bites in the morning and before bed.

Red marks were counted and circled to distinguish between the old and the new; between mosquito bites and bedbug bites. "It became almost fanatical," Burkhart said.

While trying to keep their secret, the family was also keenly aware of how easily the bugs can be transported.

"We didn't have anyone over. We didn't let the kids go to anyone's house, so they wouldn't carry anything anywhere else," Burkhart said. "We didn't want to tell anybody that this is what we were going through."

Meanwhile, the Burkharts were having to borrow money from family. The exterminator cost a few thousand dollars, and replacing the lost items cost thousands more. None of the loss was covered. The hotel chain said the family would have to prove that the bedbugs came from it. "At that point, litigation was not the first thing on our minds," she said.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners said it doesn't know of a single company that provides coverage against losses from bedbugs.

And the problem went on and on -- for three months the exterminator treated the house. Eliminating the bedbugs proved so difficult that he had to get special permission from his company to continue treatment because he'd already used so many chemicals in the house.

"To see if our room was clear, my husband would sleep up there and we'd use him as bait. There was no carpet. There was nothing," she said. "One morning, he shook his blanket, and a couple of bedbugs fell out. "

The last extermination was in July, five months after the Burkharts first picked up bedbugs. They were cautious at first, and it wasn't until just before school started that the family purchased new mattresses for the kids. But the quality of the new mattresses and couches wasn't the same as the old ones.

And to this day -- two years after their ordeal -- the family looks for things they no longer own.

"We say, 'Oh yeah. That got taken away by the bedbugs,'" Burkhart said. "It's a bad memory."


The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provides these tips for avoiding bedbugs when traveling:

-- In hotel rooms, use luggage racks to hold your luggage when packing or unpacking, rather than setting your luggage on the bed or floor.
-- Check the mattress and headboard before sleeping.
-- Upon returning home, unpack directly into a washing machine and inspect your luggage carefully.