Creepy Crawlies!

Last summer, right around this time, my mother and I were sitting on her bed at about midnight waiting for my dad to get home from a marathon elders meeting. I looked over and saw small brown spider crawling across my dad's pillow. We killed it. It just so happened that the day before, I had helped Patty take the children at church to the museum to see an Omni show called BUGS! and a lady out front had different bugs to show us, including a brown recluse. I picked up the block that the brown recluse was in, realizing that it looked just like any normal spider except with longer legs. And the spider we had just killed looked like any normal spider except with longer legs. I looked a picture up on the internet and compared it with the dead bug we had in a plastic bag and it was definitely a brown recluse. We found 8 more in our house that summer. Thus the beginning of my bug paranoia.

Ever since this day, I constantly feel like something is crawling on me. I check under my sheets every night before I go to bed, and sometimes again after I'm already in bed, even when I'm not in my house in Crowley. And even after I've checked, I have to consciously tell myself, "Nothing is crawling on you. You are fine." If you see me randomly brushing something invisible off my skin in public, it is because I feel something crawling on me. I know, its weird. But there have been 2 times when I have been wrong about this feeling. One was over Christmas when I was on the computer, I felt something crawling on my arm and lightly brushed it away to prove to myself it was nothing, and was promptly stung by a wasp. Not a fun day. The other was last night. I checked the sheets like normal, and tried to go to sleep. This morning, woke up to find cricket parts strewn all over my sheets and cricket guts rubbed in quite nicely. Apparently a cricket thought it would be fun to get in bed with me and I rolled over on it and smashed it to pieces. The worst part is, now I know my initial sheet checking is not enough and I'm going to end up looking under my covers several times - just to make sure. All I can say is at least it wasn't a brown recluse or I probably would have been bitten! Does anyone know a good exterminator?