Interesting you would say that, as someone today told me stories about children in lower income housing with roach infestations waking up to find their eyebrows eaten off.
Shudder.
Oh, well, I’m not getting to sleep tonight…
My apartment had a slight palmetto bug invasion last fall … and by slight I mean more than I ever wanted to see but there weren’t crawling all over the place. Occasionally I’d be sitting at my desk and one would go running from my bathroom into the living room; I would yell for my roommate Steven and he would be the man and smush it (I can’t stand the crunching sound ::shudder:: ).
But there was one night when Steven was out (the bastard) and another bugger decided to climb up my desk onto my printer. I tried hard to thwart it, but it decided to fly onto my door. My escape door. I was trapped in the room with it. I decide my only hope of escape is to fling the door open and run like hell.
Big mistake.
In the confusion, it flew and landed on me!!! Now, I ain’t no girly girl, but, man, I started jumping up and down, flapping my arms (don’t ask me why; it’s apparently my panic response), and screaming so loud it wakes up my other roommate’s friend who’s passed out drunk a few rooms away. Apparently, I scared the cock-a-roach, and it fell off and ran into my closet. I ran to roomie’s friend (the only other person around) and yelled, “There’s a goddamn roach in my room and it landed on me and can you get it?!” He looks up groggily and says, “Ew.” Great.
So it’s just me versus the bug. He’s come out of my closet and is trying to climb my desk again. I scare it under a pile of clothes, and I drop the biggest book I have lying around (Analytical Lexicon of Navajo by Young & Morgan), but, alas, it didn’t do the job. Eventually, Steven comes home to find me standing on my desk chair holding a broom and a drinking glass. My hero…
Eventually, I realize there’s giant hole behind my toilet, which is where they seem to be originating from, so I cover that up and voila! no more cock-a-roaches.
OK, not as bad as getting bitten by one, but it was severely traumatic for me, almost as traumatic as getting a june bug stuck in my hair when I was 5.