In a recent post, I mentioned that I became the subject of an article in a medical journal after canine scabies managed to burrow under my skin.
That’s a delightful sentence.
I was asked if I could elaborate on this incident. Here is the story.
Back in the summer of 2012, Elysha and I thought that our home had become infested with bed bugs. Over the course of a week, we began getting bitten, presumably while we slept. First me, then Elysha, then Clara, and finally Charlie.
Charlie was just a couple months old at the time, so it was especially upsetting to see his tiny body covered in bites.
Three separate inspectors came into our home and could not find any sign of any insect whatsoever. They asked if we had changed our laundry detergent, altered our diet, and other annoying questions.
Would changing our laundry detergent result in four people reacting in the exact same way?
So we continued to be bitten, and with greater and greater frequency.
After three weeks of inspections, consultations, the laying of insect traps, and massive amounts of internet research, it was decided that we would treat the house for eight different insects with hopes that the treatment would kill whatever could not be found. In addition, the mattress on our bed would be sealed, so if there were insects inside it, they would be trapped inside forever.
It is not an exaggeration to say that this consumed an enormous portion of our July and August. We would go to bed every night, dressed from head to toe in clothing, hoping to avoid being bitten again.
It sounds silly, but it was a traumatic time in our lives. Exhausting and constantly upsetting.
On the day of the scheduled treatment, the technician found a marking on a bed sheet that was a probable sign of beg bugs. Elysha has sprayed the bed frame with tea tree oil after having read that it is an insect deterrent. Some of the spray landed on the sheet, exposing a marking that appeared to be the classic sign of bed bugs. The technician cancelled the treatment immediately. Our house, he explained, would need to be treated for bed bugs, so an inspection was scheduled once again.
Oddly, we were somewhat pleased. Although the treatment for bed bugs runs in the thousands of dollars and would require us to throw away furniture and linens, dry clean clothing, bake our books in the oven, and spend at least a week decontaminating the house, we were happy to at least know what we were dealing with.
It was the inability to diagnose the problem that had been the most frustrating, and at least, it seemed as if we had an answer.
It would be three days before the treatment could begin, so Elysha took the kids to her parents’ home, hoping to find some relief. I remained home with Kaleigh, our dog.
On the first night that my family was gone, I did not bother going to sleep at all. Climbing into a bed that I knew contained bed bugs was just too much to bear.
On the second night I slept for three hours in the fetal position on the kitchen floor without blanket or pillow, in fear that all of our linens were infested as well.
Then Monday morning finally came. The inspector arrived. We disassembled the bed and spent two hours looking for any signs of a bed bug. Other than a small stain on the sheet, which the inspector said could simply be a water stain, he found nothing. “If this stain was actually the residue of bed bugs,” he explained, “then we should be able to find hundreds. We can’t even find one.”
He rescheduled the initial treatment. I asked if we should also treat for bed bugs, just in case. I was desperate. He said he could not. It turns out that it is illegal to treat for bed bugs unless a bed bug can be found.
At this point Elysha and I had lost our minds. From her in-laws’ home in the Berkshires, she began placing calls with state agencies, leaving voicemails with whoever she could find, and eventually getting in touch with the chief entomologist for the state of Connecticut. Over the phone, she explained our problem. Less than a minute into the call, she was crying.
The chief entomologist asked if Elysha was suffering from postpartum depression. She told Elysha to stop reading the horror stories about insect infestation on the internet.
She was emotional, and rightfully so. Her three-year old daughter and infant son were being bitten by some unseen insect, and no one was able to do a thing about it. Clara was tearing into her skin from her scratching, and Charlie was covered in a rash. She had a right to be upset. We had no idea what to do. We had begun talking about selling the house, throwing away everything we owned and starting over.
It was a genuinely scary time.
Then the mystery was solved.
Six weeks earlier, I had brought our dog to the vet for an allergy flare-up. Kaleigh suffered from seasonal allergies, so the vet thought nothing of this latest attack and administered the standard treatment and prescribed the standard medication. In that time since that appointment, Kaleigh’s allergies had gotten worse, and we assumed that she was being bitten by the same insect that was biting us. In fact, she had stopped sleeping on the bed weeks before and eventually stopped coming upstairs altogether.
The cat had also taken to sleeping on my desk instead of his customary cushion in our room.
The animals, we thought, knew that something was wrong, too, and they had evacuated as best they could.
The same day that the insect treatment was re-rescheduled for the house, I brought Kaleigh back to the vet’s office for her follow-up appointment. The vet examined her skin and was surprised to find that she was not responding to the allergy treatment as she had so many times before. I explained that we thought she was being bitten by the same thing that was biting us, and that he skin was probably reacting like ours.
“You’re being bitten, too?” he asked.
I showed him my arms. He was shocked at how badly they had been bitten.
“I know what that is,” he said.
“You do?” I asked. “You really do?”
“I think so,” he said. “I’ll be able to tell you in a couple minutes.”
I hugged him.
After examining a skin scraping under the microscope, he confirmed that Kaleigh was infected with a mite that causes the canine version of scabies, and we were reacting to these mites as well. The vet explained that the mite infecting Kaleigh is exceptionally rare and typically only found on foxes and other wild animals. It is what gives them their mangy appearance. The only way to contract this mite is to come into direct contact with an infected animal.
Kaleigh on a leash 100% of the time and had not come into contact with any other animal in months. Other than perhaps the sniffing of an occasional dog who we pass on the streets, there is no way that she could have come in contact with a wild animal.
We still have no idea how this could have happened.
The veterinarian also explained that it is one of the worst things that can happen to an animal. It’s itchy and painful and exceptionally uncomfortable, as I can also attest. But as much as we were suffering, Kaleigh’s suffering was exponentially worse.
As the vet was explaining this condition to me, I was texting the news to Elysha, who happened to be on the phone with the state entomologist. She relayed the vet’s diagnosis to the entomologist, and the entomologist became immediately excited over the possibility of getting a sample of this rare mite.
They had never seen a live sample before. The entomologist doubted that our vet’s diagnosis was correct.
She ordered that slides of the skin scraping and a tube of live mites be brought to her office first thing in the morning.
The treatment for this mite, the vet said, is to simply to treat the dog with heart worm pills. Once the dog is mite-free, we would be mite-free. Best of all, the mites cannot live off their host, so nothing in our home had been infested with the insect.
Also, person-to-person transfer of the mite is almost impossible unless you have constant, close contact with another person. In all likelihood, I had passed the mite onto the kids and maybe even Elysha since I have the most contact with the dog, but we were not capable of passing it onto other friends or family by simply being in their presence.
So we could not infect anyone else.
The next day I was sitting in the offices of the Connecticut Department of Agriculture beneath an inflatable bed bug, where excited scientists were getting their first look at a mite that is so rare that finding a living specimen on an infected animal is almost impossible. Even the vet said that he almost never finds the mite through a skin scraping but treats the animal for them anyway, knowing how hard it is to actually find one.
Kaleigh was covered in them.
I was shown the mite while under the microscope. It’s a horrifying little creature. The entomologist called the chief entomologist, who asked again if Elysha might be suffering from postpartum depression. I listened as the entomologist assured her boss that they were helping “that poor woman who called yesterday.”
“Her husband’s sitting right here,” the entomologist said. “I promise to take good care of them.”
Elysha can certainly make an impression.
The entomologist confirmed that if we treated the dog, the problem should be solved, though there was a chance that the mites may have infected us as well, meaning we would all need to be treated. As I was leaving the office, the entomologist said, “Next time you have an issue with insects, call us. That’s what we’re here for.”
A lesson to you all:
Don’t hesitate to go straight to the top.
Elysha, the kids and I saw multiple doctors and ultimately decided to be treated for the mite, just in case.vI asked the vet if I should also take a heart worm pill. “I would,” he said. “It would probably work just as well for you as it will for Kaleigh, but I can’t advise doing so.”
Elysha forbade it. Instead, we applied a cream on our bodies – from head to two – for five nights in a row. In truth, it was likely that only I was infected with the mite, since my rashes had persisted while everyone else’s have reduced considerably.
“It makes sense,” Elysha said last night as we applied the treatment. “You have a lot of hair.”
“So the mites confused me for a dog?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
The pediatric dermatologist was just as excited about our condition as the state entomologist, taking photographs of my son’s skin for a journal article that she said she might write about this rare case. She had never seen it before, either. None of the doctors who treated us had ever seen this happen before.
My dermatologist discovered that the mites had actually burrowed beneath my skin. “You might be the first person ever to have these mites under your skin,” she said. More excitement. More photographs. More talk of a future medical journal.
In every case, doctors couldn’t believe what they were seeing.
One of the doctors actually called the Centers for Disease Control for advice.
As I said, you cannot imagine how much of our summer had been consumed by this problem. I spent the summer writing about it every day, which is how I’m able to remember so much from that time with so much detail, though I suspect that Elysha could do just as well.
It’s the kind of thing you never forget.
As my friend Shep said at the time, “If it’s mysterious, rare, or a never-seen-before condition, you are the one who is going to get it.”
He’s right.
My life might always be interesting, but that doesn’t mean it’s always fun.
But even with the canine scabies, the kids were still so damn cute back then.
