Wow. That was *really* weird.

The last several days have been very, very strange. Sunday night we were totally exhausted from a sleepless night Saturday and an extremely busy, stressful day spent eradicating any remaining mites in the house. We fell into bed at long last and attempted to sleep, but were haunted by the sensation of mites crawling on our skin. We tossed and turned, dozing briefly before scratching and tossing again. Dreadful. We got about two hours of sleep that night and by Monday morning I was utterly undone.

Looking around at my house I was convinced that the entire place was crawling with invisible, blood sucking parasites and no matter what we did they would never go away. I'd gone slightly mad, basically. Sleep deprivation paired with inconsistent information really did a number on my head.

I spent the day washing every single thing in our house and vacuuming every surface and arranging for an exterminator to come. Anyone who knows our attitudes about chemicals and health will understand what an extreme measure that is, but that's how far I'd gotten in my paranoia.

Thankfully, that afternoon I spoke to a very sensible entomologist from the county extension office who helped calm me a lot. He said that the bird mites are short lived and if I take sensible precautions, like cleaning thoroughly and often, they'll soon be history. He also said that many people get freaked out by them and that it's easy to let yourself get carried away, especially given that the thing you're worried about is invisible. Is it there or not? You can't tell. Clearly we were at a fork in the road. We could become obsessive or we could return to normal life. We chose the latter.

(As an aside, he told me about an elderly couple here in B-ham who became convinced that their house was incessantly infested with bird mites. They brought sample after sample to the lab but nary a mite could be found, but that didn't change their opinion a bit. They eventually burned every scrap of furniture in their house and moved out of state. Total wackos.)

So that night before bed Robbie and I bathed and made the bed with the fresh clean linens I'd washed that day and we slept like logs. The next morning we decided that since the mites can't live without a 'blood meal' (oh, yuck) from an avian host, and that the few mites that had survived my incessant cleaning would soon die out, we would just try to disregard them.

It's been interesting to see how something can come to dominate your thoughts and affect what you feel strongly about and how you act. We like to think of ourselves as strong, independent thinkers with clear ideals and agendas, but poof! it can all come tumbling down just like that. I always wondered how intolerance for certain animals or even different ethnic sects or religious groups can take hold and I'll bet at the root of it is ignorance and paranoia. I'm glad we're done with our lesson now. :-P