Lessons from the Bugs, or Why Strong is the New “S” Word
Nov 10th, 2015 by Kimberly
Honestly, I don’t feel like writing right now, but I promised my cat I wouldn’t clean anymore today.
Sometimes life feels like it will not let up. About two weeks ago, after writing my upbeat blog on how to keep going when things get tough, I started noticing bites on my stomach. With the humid weather, we’ve had a bumper crop of bugs, so I didn’t think much of it at first, but it got worse in a hurry and the bites itched like all hell. I wondered if maybe I’d contracted something – could you get chicken pox twice? Did shingles look like this? Had my measles shot worn off? The first doctor said they were bites, and suggested I had bedbugs. He got the address of my pharmacy and called in a prescription for hydrocortisone. When I got to my local Rite-Aid, the pharmacist told me that he’d “prescribed” me a 1% over-the-counter solution, and I could find it on aisle five. (My dad says I should have skipped the doctor and gone straight to the pharmacy. “They’ll tell you where aisle five is for free.”) Trying desperately to hold on to my sanity, I did a Google search and found Top Dog, an L.A.-based service that introduced me to Dean, the bedbug-sniffing beagle. Dean came out, sniffed around the house and found nothing. No bedbugs at all. Back to the doctor I went – maybe a parasite? No, they told me. Bug bites. “You’ll have to pay attention and figure out what it is,” the doctor told me.
One of the silverfish invading the house and Zoe’s litter box. Annoying, but not what was biting me.
PAY ATTENTION??? What did he think I’d been doing for the last week, non-stop? It’s a really good thing I don’t have kids, because if I’d taken my kid in with terrible itchy bites and he’d told me, “Well, pay attention and figure it out,” I think I might have killed him. I sure as hell would have tried.
While Dean’s handler didn’t have any alternative ideas, he did have a list of tips on how to de-bug your home, and I started in with a fury. Seal up all the cracks in the baseboards – bugs get in through the walls that way. Clean all the dusty areas – some bugs feed on dust. Launder what you can. If it can’t get wet, throw it in the dryer for thirty minutes. If it doesn’t fit in the washing machine, vacuum it. Get rid of paper. Some of those might be spider bites, and spiders love to nest in old paper. Put passive traps under your bed to track what bugs might be crawling on you. (Fun thought, that.) Clean the floors with wintergreen oil.
I went into a cleaning frenzy the likes of which this house has never experienced. I pulled all the furniture out from the walls and vacuumed behind them. You could eat off my baseboards (provided your food was very little and you cleaned afterwards because for the love of God I just vacuumed there). I vaccuumed each and every book on my book case, and every piece of furniture including my cat’s hammock and scratching post. My cat hid under the bed or I would have vacuumed her, too. (She got flea medicine.) I slept in the living room and washed the sheets and futon cover every day for a week.
Why didn’t you call an exterminator? you might ask. Well, aside of having no great love for chemicals, I couldn’t get any of them to call me back. Did I mention that we’ve had a big bug year here in L.A.? Yeah. They’re that busy. At last, I talked to the exterminators at the office who agreed that sure, they could come treat my house. They used the lightest treatment possible, and they attack spots instead of fumigating the whole house, so I decided to go for it.
By the time the exterminators got there, every stitch of clothing I owned except the ones currently on my body lay in plastic bags in the living room. And not just clothing. Have you ever tried washing everything in your house? Every piece of washable fabric? Every sock, camisole, skirt, Halloween costume, towel, tablecloth, napkin, sheet, pillowcase, blanket, sleeping bag, throw rug, coat, sweater and pocket handkerchief you possess? I’m a single person in a small house and the mall does not rank high on my list of favorite places. Nevertheless, I managed to go through a box of thirty trash bags in nothing flat.
And that’s just to bag up the launderables. That doesn’t even touch the stuff I actually threw out. Bags full of items I suddenly deemed unnecessary got tossed out of the house at a speed that would have put Madison Bumgarner’s fastball to shame.
The day before the exterminator came, my dad went through his second surgery in two weeks. He came through it beautifully, as my family assured me each of the times I called and texted them, which was a lot. My cell phone company sent me a cautionary note that for once in the history of my usage, I might go over my total minutes. Someone there fainted, I’m pretty sure, since I usually use no more than a quarter of my monthly allotment.
At last, the bug bites stopped. Partly because of my insane cleaning, mostly because of the exterminator. After eight days bite-free (hey, at least I’ve stopped counting in hours) I am beginning to feel like this is my home again.
Throughout the whole experience, especially the bugs, I found myself feeling very alone and depressed, but it got to the point where I didn’t much want to talk to anyone, either, because someone was going to use the S word. Not “shit.” I would have been completely on board with that. Used it a lot myself. No, the word in question was “Strong.” As in, “You’re strong, you can handle this,” or “Stay strong,” or “I’ll pray for strength for you.” It got to the point where I hated it.
Why did that seem so familiar, I wondered?
Ah, yes. Because I’d read about the feeling before, without completely understanding it. I’d read pieces by people with disabilities or parents of special needs kids, and they almost universally hated being told how amazingly strong they were. I didn’t get it. Didn’t they want people to acknowledge that they had to deal with more than the average person? (I am reminded here of a friend who is a doula, and her great story about the woman who did not want anyone to look at her while she was in labor. Meet me and Laura for coffee sometime. It’s hilarious.)
I get it now. They hate being told that they’re strong because after a while, it stops sounding like a compliment. It starts to sound like an excuse. “Wow, you’re so strong.” I don’t pretend to understand what anyone else’s life is like, and I know that my irritations and worries over the past couple of months do not equal someone else’s lifelong medical condition. But in some small way, I think I hear a little of the translation they’ve been railing against in that phrase. If someone is going through hardships that you are not and you tell them, “You’re so strong. I could never do that,” it starts to sound like, “God made you stronger than I am. Since I’m not that strong, I just got an easier life.” If they’d been given the choice, people might have chosen to be a little less strong and a little more catered to, thanks just the same. You can’t do a lot of things, until you have to. I couldn’t move the filing cabinet until I needed to kill anything that lurked behind it. People can’t survive on three hours’ sleep until they have a newborn. My friend couldn’t give herself shots until she found out she was diabetic and her existence depended on it. You can do a lot, when you don’t have any other choice.
I hated every minute of having my loved ones in the hospital (Grandma broke her foot just before Dad’s surgeries) and having biting insects in my house. (And no, I still don’t know what they were. The pest control guy guessed mosquitos. I’ve seen one or two, but not enough to justify 63 bites in one week – yes, I counted.) That said, though, the experience taught me something. The next time one of my dear friends is going through it – whether it’s a chronic condition or a sporadic thing – I will hold off on telling her how strong she is. I will tell her I’m available to help with laundry on Saturday, or to check her mailbox for a gift card to In-N-Out so she can buy herself the Double-Double she so richly deserves, or that what she’s going through completely sucks and I wish she didn’t have to. But I will not tell her that she is strong.
Instead, I will try to find a way to make her life a little bit easier, so she knows she doesn’t have to be strong around me.
Kimberly has to get back to work now. Those bags aren’t going to unpack themselves. She knows this for a fact because she watched for a few days, just in case.
So true on so many levels! Wish I could buy you a pumpkin spice coffee and laugh/cry about it. *Taking my coffee in hand* – here’s to an itch-free week.
I know what you mean about not being able to do something until you have to. I was terrified to drive, hadn’t driven in 7 or so years, but then Scott was taken to the hospital and I had a 9-month-old baby at the time and couldn’t ride with him in the ambulance. So I got in the car and drove–on the highway, which was a particular fear of mine–to the hospital. When I walked into Scott’s room (with the baby), Scott asked how I’d gotten there.
“I drove.”
“The car?”
“. . .”
“I thought I’d have to take a cab home from the hospital,” he said.
But of course I wasn’t going to make him do that! And once I’d driven again after so long, I started doing it a little more and a little more until it became . . . No, not easy. But easier. And if someone were to say I was “strong” in that moment, or that I’m being strong now in overcoming a fear, I’d be like: “Uh, what were my options? What were they then and what are they now? Yeah, I could’ve left him at the hospital. I could stay home and only go places I can walk to. But what kind of person am I? Not that kind.”
Only because you asked, you CAN get chicken pox twice (I did, my grandmother did, and my sister did) and shingles is a red, burning mess of dots that actually follow where the nerves that come from the infected nerve ganglion come up to the skin’s surface. The same grandmother, sister, and I have all had that, too. And it often comes up during high stress times.
When things are somewhat stable, it can be appreciated when someone thinks you’re strong. But I think most of us are when what is causing so much distress is a loved one who needs our help. And when we are in the middle of it, platitudes are nice sometimes, commiseration is normally better and offers of help even more so. Life can be really hard, but I truly hope yours is getting easier.
Glad you found the solution Kimberley!
“Those bags aren’t going to unpack themselves. She knows this for a fact because she watched for a few days, just in case.”
LOL
I’ve been waiting for years for my boxes of old papers and clutter to sort themselves out, but I haven’t given up…yet. “Hope springs eternal”