Day 22: What are phantom bites?
So I read about S and G’s experiments getting bitten by bed bugs in a controlled sort-of experiment. I was also interested in S’s description of itchy spots she had been getting during months when there were no other signs of bed bugs in her apartment vs. the bites she got from the experiment.
I’m still unsure of the terminology as they use them… whether “phantom bites” refers to psychosomatic itchy spots conjured up merely by the fear of bed bugs, or whether they are old bites that start to itch and irritate again months later, or some other phenomenon.
They are similar to the ones I got over the weekend that really freaked me out. (I called my awesome pest control company and one of the managers there talked to me for a full 19 minutes and 17 seconds according to my call history… he answered all of my questions and told me to call him back in a week to follow up, whether I was still getting bitten or not.)
My own theory based on absolutely nothing is that my “phantom bites” are bites made by bed bugs in a weakened or damaged state who are going through the motions of getting a blood feed but certainly can’t go for five to ten whole minutes, like the ones that fed on S in the experiment.
And just because they survived so far and got a blood feed doesn’t mean that sometime in the past few days they finally crossed enough poison and are dead.
