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I was a third-rate Khaleesi

How I became responsible for the care and feeding of thousands of little orphans.

Not Mosquitos

(Previously on “She went to the south of France without a keeper” our heroine was trying to keep her dignity in spite of suffering from a little known nervous disorder which results in an inability to dress properly. Read previous entries under the travel blog tab.)

If anyone out there still envies me after reading this, I’ll eat my straw hat, scarf included.

The July 25 outing to Bagnols had as one of its aims the purchase of a mosquito net. Dozens of painful itchy bites had appeared virtually overnight upon arrival to Salazac. Raised welts, swelling, etc. I thought, “I must be allergic to the French mosquito. How odd.” After buying not one but three mosquito nets, one of them a fancy camping one which could be strung over a camp bed, I was no closer to achieving a good night’s sleep. After spending a few nights cowering under the mosquito net, trying to keep it closed and away from my body, difficult to do in a low ceilinged alcove, I had finally realized that my mosquito net had great big holes along the seams. One night at 3 am, I disentangled myself from my protective cocoon of sheet and net, stood outside the net and focused on a pair of small mosquitos waving from inside the net. I had to go back to the store to return the first net. My complaint that the net was full of holes elicited the response of “Mais bien sûre, Madame, c’est un mustiquaire.” Very funny, but said quite seriously. I patiently showed her the defective seams. This time around, I got two mosquito nets thinking I could put them together and achieve maximum protection.

By now I resembled a medieval drawing of a plague victim, one of those with the person lying there stiffly, wearing a sort of white diaper raiment, and covered in bright red spots. I was in terrible discomfort, covered in ugly, itchy, swollen bites. The ones on my arms where in a strange pattern: three, all in a straight line. Eventually more appeared and took on the look of The Big Dipper. I counted 100 bites and then stopped counting as it began to be a depressing pastime.

My trips to the pharmacy and supermarket in search of a remedy, deterrent, or ultimate killing anti–bug weapon became obsessive. I drove to lovely towns and stopped to look at fascinating chateaux and made stops at all the pharmacies along the way. The electrical contraption mentioned on July 5^th was the first of many purchases: Citronella diffusers, lavender oil, repellent sprays, soothing ointments with and without cortisone, antihistamines, candles, etc.

One very kind Pharmacist, who spoke Spanish and had been to the Peruvian amazon, told me it was difficult to repel mosquitos and that the bites looked like they could be from a smaller type of local mosquito. He suggested the lavender oil. He was wrong. A few days into this nightmare two of the bites developed the classic bull’s eye rash (ie Lyme disease rash).

I dithered and denied and put off the inevitable and eventually called my landlady’s doctor, the hilariously named Dr. Clape. This after one of my neighbours and a pharmacist both ventured to suggest that the bites looked like the work of bedbugs. By this time I had seen a bright red bug leaving the seen of the crime, an adult by its size, otherwise known as Mom. I had also seen many smaller ones strolling across the sheets. All this time I had been cocooning myself against the mosquitoes, the enemy had been lurking within the confines of my rickety bed. Once I had inspected the mattress, I wished I hadn’t. I had bought a chemical bug bomb, which had to be deployed and then left in the closed room for three hours. I was never able to bring myself to sleep in the bedroom again. I picked up the bedside table lamp and retreated to the living room and its broken click-clack futon.

The doctor turned out to be a genius and immediately understood my problem, prescribed antibiotics and sent me for blood tests. The wording on the order form is not one you want to read while on holidays: Maladie de Lyme. But the fact that he took me seriously and knew I might have to take antibiotics long term made me very grateful I didn’t get sick in Canada.

By this time I was doing massive amounts of laundry everyday, dragging bedding and area rugs and couch covers up and down the hill from the house to the clothesline set up at the bottom of the garden. The Scottish couple in the straw bale house lay blissfully in the sun as I fought a losing battle with tiny vampires. It seemed I had clearly drawn the short straw in this rental. Their side of the house was unaffected. They invited me over for wine; and in exchange I wittily regaled them with tales of my battle against the bug demons. Strangely, after a while, the invitations seemed to dry up. Perhaps mentioning I was also hosting an infestation of fleas was a mistake. The added bonus of a bedbug infestation is that you become a social leper.

The Scottish man in the straw bale house had listened with great interest when I explained I had finally found out where the bugs had been hiding. My theory at the time was that they were fleas, as they appeared to jump when I tried to catch them. His eyebrows shot up, “Fleas?” he said politely.

At three in the morning (that’s right, I had stopped sleeping by then) I was conducting another one of my close inspections of the bed, trying to cut them off at the pass as it were, when I looked over at the lamp and saw a youngster venturing out for a midnight snack. Big mistake. I’m sure his mother loved him, but I killed him anyway. So she had cleverly found them a nice, cozy, warm bed and they had been nestled in the felt base of the lamp the whole time. When I had collected it from the bedroom, I had simply brought them along for a picnic. I sprayed the lamp with every insect killer I had but they thrived on the stuff and continued to make forays. I made a druidic circle of talcum powder around the lamp and found great entertainment in watching the bedbugs get stuck in the powder and flounder around like tiny cross-country skiers overwhelmed by a snowstorm.

“Doesn’t she have anything better to do,” you ask yourselves?

As I say bedbugs have the effect of turning the most inoffensive person into a social pariah. My only chance for romance at this point would have been to meet a very brave entomologist working on a dissertation entitled Bedbugs: Lyme Disease Vector? – A Field Study.

While I was still explaining to everyone I met that I had been the victim of particularly vicious mosquitos; I encountered nothing but compassion and concern. Mosquitos, after all, are an equal-opportunity pest. You can’t ostracize a mosquito-bite sufferer because you could easily become the next victim. They are considered tiny winged acts of God and everyone can commiserate over their respective mosquito bites.

Once you wander into the lonely land of the bedbug, however, you’re on your own. Even Dr. Clape joked that he should probably be seeing me outside and I’m sure he wielded the DDT spray bottle as soon as I left. I went to see him a few times, oppressed by the certainty that I was dying of Lyme disease, and he calmly assured me that it was too soon to tell. He had a Lyme disease patient who had been on antibiotics for 5 months. This was not reassuring, but at least he knew what to do if it came to that. As I left the office, he told me that later on in the year was the season for dengue fever and West Nile virus…

“We are becoming a tropical country with global warming,” he said, gleefully.