My itch began last June. I had spent five days at an artists’ retreat in the Catskill Mountains, about two hours from New York City. It’s an idyllic setting, a vast old summer boarding house surrounded by pine trees. I have been there many times, so when I noticed some bites under my arms, I didn’t pay much attention. I always get bitten by something in the Catskills. When I returned to Toronto, I noticed a few more. Then I got an e‑mail from my hosts, telling me they had found bedbugs.

In denial, I reassured myself that my bites didn’t fit the bedbug profile: two or three in a row, a pattern doctors call breakfast-lunch-dinner, often found on the arms and legs. I had a few single bites scattered across my stomach, and there weren’t any blood spots on my sheets, another indicator. I persuaded myself the bites were scabies.

Then, one morning in early July, I snapped awake at 5 a.m., threw back my linens and saw two tiny crawling dots. I reached out to catch one, and squashed it. A tiny blood spot appeared on the sheet. My blood. Full bedbug.

I sat hunched over in the middle of my bed. I felt sick and frozen. I knew something of the labour that lay ahead. My brother and his partner had bedbugs a year before, in Parkdale, and I witnessed their two-month nightmare. He became a haggard red-eyed zombie, exhausted by sleeplessness and endless rounds of laundry, vacuuming and caulking. His partner wasn’t being bitten, or wasn’t reacting (many people don’t), so she kept it together, but he went a little nuts. In the end, they moved to Hamil­ton. I didn’t want to move. I share the second and third floor of a semi-detached house in Brockton with an old friend, Karin, and we love the place. My room on the top floor has a big deck off the back. We have an excellent landlady who lives on the ground floor. I felt guilty that I had brought this curse into the house. I had a faint hope I could get it all dealt with in the month before Karin came home from her holiday. Her room is jam-packed with stuff, even more than mine, and it would be like a rainforest for bedbugs seeking cover. But as long as there was no one in there, I told myself, bedbugs were unlikely to migrate.

I was slightly comforted by odd things: my beloved old cat had just died, and I was relieved not to be worrying about him in the middle of this; I’d just ended a relationship (to my disappointment), but staring at these damn bugs in my bed, I was suddenly glad to be single.

I had no idea how solitary the next two months would become. Throughout July, I rode my bike home from my job at a daycare to my now grim, alienating apartment, and spent most evenings doing laundry, bagging up belongings, and performing a series of other rituals to get rid of the bugs. I fretted about taking bedbugs with me to work or to friends’ houses. I put my knapsack through the dryer often, and when I came home, I hung it from the doorknob in the front hall, two floors away from my bedroom. It never touched the floor, never entered my room. Even so, when I visited friends, I left my bag hidden on the porch, behind recycling bins. At the daycare, I hung it up far from anyone’s belongings.

The infestation was isolating and embarrassing—I have never felt so furtive and awkward. I couldn’t invite people over but didn’t want to say why; I would catch myself scratching compulsively in public and frequently looking under my clothes, convinced a bug was crawling on me.

I had to get rid of them.