For months, Rachel Kempster has been obsessed day and night, unable to close her eyes without thinking about the new urban terror to hit New Yorkers: bedbugs. "It's something I wouldn't wish on my absolutely worst enemy," said Kempster, a book publicist who describes the bites, the itching, the anguish and even the shame of the bedbug menace.
After hitting the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, the bedbugs have now made their way to Manhattan and have not spared some of the most upscale and best maintained buildings and hotels in the city.
Bedbug worries have prompted advertisements from exterminators, promising to come to the rescue: "Bedbugs - we take care of it!"
A nocturnal insect that grows to about five millimeters (three sixteenths of an inch), but is much smaller and translucent as a new-born, the bedbug feeds during the night off the blood of its hosts. Common in the United States and Europe until they were eradicated after World War II, the bedbug has made a comeback in American cities - starting with New York.
"People were taken by surprise," said Louis Sorkin, entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Travel and a prohibition on certain pesticides helped allow the bedbugs to return, he said.
"Any room is fair game to them, any house is fair game to them. People thought they were found in dirty places, but the truth is they (the bugs) don't care," said Sorkin, showing off a jar of bedbugs that have fed on his forearm.
The entomologist advised to check out hotel beds for the insect, though the bedbugs are often not easy to see.
Although accustomed to cockroaches and rodents of all types, New Yorkers seem especially distraught over the bedbugs' resurgence, with newspapers devoting entire pages to the subject. While bedbugs transmit no disease, they strike their targets in bed and are difficult to locate and eradicate.
In the warmth of crevices in furniture and floorboards, the bedbugs proliferate, crawling from one apartment to another, travelling by mattresses or clothes.
Rachel Kempster had been noticing insect bites for six months and assumed it was a case of pesky mosquitoes, until she recognised she was facing a bedbug invasion in her Queens home.
"I realised they were all over. They were in my shoes - baby ones - they were in my closet, they were in my books, they were in all my notebooks and any paper I had," she said.
To combat the bedbugs, Kempster and her boyfriend threw away anything they thought might be infested, from books to knitting yarn.
"We threw the mattress away, we ripped up all the rugs and threw all the rugs away, we threw away all of my yarns - about 1,000 dollars worth of yarns. My boyfriend threw out about half to three quarters of all his books. I threw out all my shoes.
"When I look back, there are some things I probably didn't have to throw away, but I did because you just feel panicked," Kempster said.
The purge cost 5,000 dollars and put her social life on virtual hold. For Marie, a French teacher who asked not to be named, the bedbugs arrived from a second-hand table.
"The worst part is the idea of being bitten while you sleep. And the fear of passing it on, so you can no longer invite guests over to your home."
At the supermarket, there are no anti-bedbug sprays for sale. Marie found a product recommended by a friend from a veterinarian website. Kempster called in professionals. Expert advice calls for inspecting the darkest nooks.
The number of bedbug complaints have mushroomed, according to city authorities. Between June 2005 to June 2006, the city received 4,638 complaints, compared to 1,839 the previous year.
To stem the tide, local authorities are considering a possible ban on the sale of used mattresses.
"It's a concern. Bedbugs are certainly a challenge because they are quite difficult to get rid of, and they seem to capture people's attention, that's for sure," said Neill Coleman, spokesman for the city's department of housing preservation and development.
But he said it was important not to overstate the problem. "To put it in context, in 2006 there were almost 250,000 complaints about heat and hot water," Coleman said.
Educating the public was crucial, as there remained a mistaken belief that bedbugs were associated with dirty homes. "The problem is people not saying it, because they feel bad and dirty," said Sorkin of the natural history museum.
Six months after her ordeal, Kempster is still haunted by the tiny insects that took up residence in her home.
"We still don't have a bed, we sleep on an air mattress, because I can vacuum it and there's no place for anything to hide. Every time I open a book in our apartment I check the cover and make sure nothing moves."