Curses, foiled again!

Today, suddenly consumed with a burning need to have more information on bedbug extermination, I called two of the PCO's that I had called previously. Really, information was all I wanted, but before I knew it, I had an appointment for another inspection at 2 this afternoon.

The inspector arrived and was awed by our prep work (all the furniture was still pulled away from the walls, and most of our possessions were in garbage bags) but was not awed by my bedbug specimens. "Those aren't bedbugs; those are baby roaches," he told me.

What? Baby roaches? Now, I knew we had cockroaches since my female housemate had so graciously brought them from her old apartment when she moved in. But she and her boyfriend had applied some lethal substance all over the basement a few months ago, and it seemed like the roaches had finally gone for good (except for the giant deformed one I had found on the living room wall shortly after our fogger treatment). So it had not even occurred to me to consider that my 3 stooges were not the bloodsucking monsters I believed them to be.

But immediately, I Googled "cockroach nymphs," and found the following picture:

This awesome photo is courtesy of Flickr user cdresz

Compare those little creepy-crawlies (no, not the blobby grub-looking thing. That's an ootheca, which could be my new favorite word, even though I have no clue what it means) to the creepy-crawlies that I extracted from my freezer:

This spectacular photo is courtesy of me.

And you will understand why I chose the title for this post. Why does my evidence keep turning into an utter lack of evidence? And why were there baby roaches in my bedroom!? OK, it's possible that they weren't in my bedroom. The freezer was downstairs, in the hub of the cockroach infestation, so it's possible the roaches got into the freezer by some means other than via my box of art paper. After all, the fruit flies did it.

But the more pressing question is once again, what's eating me? Two seasoned pest inspectors have failed to find any evidence of bedbugs. Is it possible we really don't have bedbugs at all? I would like that outcome, especially since the estimates keep going up and up. The inspector that visited quoted $1200 to treat the whole house, and the one I called estimated something like $3000!

My new plan of action is thus: Maintain the status quo—that means, keep my light dusting of diatomaceous earth around the bed and carpet edges and hope that it does its desiccation thing and kill off what must be a fairly small population of bedbugs. If, after 2 weeks, any of my housemates is still getting bites, I will spring for the canine inspection. And then let those results determine what to do next.