Stripper vs Bed Bugs.

My roommate of three years and very good friend told us the classic New York story about how she had met a girl at church who ended up getting kicked out of her apartment and college. She was looking for a place to stay, and of course she ended up with the said friend. She only had two suitcases full of skimpy clothing. Turns out she was working at a prominent strip club in New York. I believe she has hugged my friend before in the nude.

Little did we know that we would have our own New York story to tell. So, as many of you already know, we are subletting for a month before we are able to move into our Mount Sinai housing, which will be our place for four years. Well, about a week and a half in, Alex wakes up to find himself covered (and I mean covered) with itchy welts and bites. I quick search online confirmed the worst – we had a case of BED BUGS.

We ended sleeping in the living room on a air mattress that belonged to my med-peds co-intern through the weekend. We did four loads of laundry that cost us about $100. All our laundry went into ziplock bags which then went into trash bags. We threw away our 2 large luggage bags and poured boiling water on everything we could. All our shoes went into the freezer along with our important documents and papers. (This is where working in the operating room on a sterile field came in handy). We are planning on throwing our two backpacks into the dryer, and putting our smaller luggage in the car on a sunny day to heat them up.

Alex combed through the chairs, couches, mattress, our luggage and bags looking for bugs (we found some). He vacuumed obsessively. He wouldn’t sleep, and would sleep with a flashlight, getting up everyone once in a while to shine it around the room. We slept with the bathroom light on.

We then moved in with the same med-peds co-intern who had just moved into her Mount Sinai housing (thankfully a two bedroom). When we got to her apartment, we threw the little ziplock bags with only the clothes and toiletries we needed into the apartment and threw the garbage bag away. We changed clothes and put everything we had been wearing, clothes, shoes, messenger bags into the dryer. This was all the day before intern year started.

So no, the first day of intern year did not make me cry – but I almost fell apart the day before internship, on the account of these creatures almost not visible to the human eye.

Alex's comment: "There were so many bedbugs that they lifted our air mattress and moved us back to the bedroom!"

We decided we would definitely take the stripper any day of the week. Welcome to New York.