Hypochondria

I woke up with a suspicious-looking red blotch on my left arm this morning. Since it was also itchy, I forced myself not to panic. I've noticed a few of these false alarms over the past few weeks upon my morning inspections of my body for new bites. Sometimes it's just red because I slept on the bedsheets the wrong way or because I've just been scratching there for some reason. I was slightly more nervous this morning than usual since there seemed to be a small bump in the center of the splotch. I think what is happening here, folks, is that I'm giving myself hives from worrying about bedbugs too much. Sigh.

In order to stop focusing on the mysterious red splotch on my arm, I started scratching my chest. And then there was a HUGE red splotch there and I almost passed out.

I have little white dots all over my body from where I scratched the heads right off the bites and they scarred. And there are some more bruise-like dots from where I got the most concentrated bouts of bites. One night I got over two dozen bites, all on my right shoulder and on the upper portion of my right arm. Someone saw the remains of those a week or so ago and thought that someone had tried to beat me up and almost called 911 from her cell phone right there in front of me to report it.

In the meantime, despite all the mental trauma, I think I am now eight days bedbug free. That's how long it's been since I killed the last one. At this point, I care more about having to do all that laundry again than I do about bedbug bites. This is exhausting.