How often do you change your bed sheets? Is it every week or do you wait a month or more? If you’re not doing it every week, then you could wind up sharing your bed with some seriously creepy crawlers, not to mention dirt. Just ask one woman from Birmingham who aired her dirty laundry on television and let’s just say it’s downright disturbing. So here’s what might lurking in your mattress. We dare you to find out.But what did rarely mean for Karen Aldridge from Birmingham? Try three weeks or even four, especially when things get very hectic in her personal life, but most people don’t change the sheets for even longer.
What they found was plenty of dirt, not to mention bed bugs lurking in every nook and cranny of her mattress, which made even Aldridge cringe at the thought of what she’d been laying on.
Among them are dead skin cells as well as sweat, but dust mites are also bound to accumulate, which is what a Rentokil expert found when he was called in to clean Aldridge’s mattresses.
This sent the woman screaming in shock, but she got not sympathy from Alice, the show’s consumer expert, who asked, “Can you believe how much dirt you were sleeping on?”
The fact is that we tend to ignore what we can’t see with our own eyes, but Karen finally saw the truth and said “that is just shocking, absolutely shocking. I can’t believe how much dirt was in there.”
But the comments that they would make about Karen were less than stellar. In fact, some comments were downright mean, but we can attribute that simply to the shock everyone felt over the ickiness that lurked in the woman’s mattress.
Meanwhile, her son Joey has been sleeping on the same mattress for the last 12 years, and admitted quite embarrassed that she would often use the same sheets for weeks on end.
So Luke advised her and the viewers that people should consider vacuuming their beds on a regular basis and to air out their mattress by opening windows and washing sheets with hot water to get rid of bed bugs.
While most of us wouldn’t be bold enough to admit that we probably don’t change our sheets for weeks, possibly months, Karen was willing to do this on television, so at the very least she deserves credit for doing that.
Add to that the fact that she admitted it on television and people were simply stunned by the audacity of it all, but Alice assured Karen that this is nothing to be ashamed of. “This is just the reality of what lives inside a mattress.”
She has a husband. Doesn’t he have an equal responsibility to change the sheets as well? So why isn’t he getting any backlash? Obviously, they both work and should help each other out. The same goes for any household, not just Karen’s.
That’ enough to make you cringe. In fact, dust mites are responsible for plenty of health ailments like asthma and allergies among children and the elderly. Also, in the spring, dust mite infestations are an even bigger issue to contend with.
You’re just sharing your bed with them and the byproduct of their waste is really what can trigger an allergic reaction as you inhale. Now tell us, doesn’t this make you feel better? Actually, it’s small comfort.
They tend to gather along the seams and edges of box springs and mattresses, and you know you have them if you notice blackish spots in or around your bed, which is actually excrement from the bed bugs.
They look like small, brownish, flat insects and are about 3/16″ long, but are sometimes mistaken for ticks, roaches or other insects commonly found in your home. Now bed bugs don’t fly or jump, but they crawl over floors, walls and ceilings.
They can lay as much as 1 or 2 eggs a day, spawning hundreds during each bed bug’s lifetime, but since they’re tiny, many people mistake them for whitish dust specs, but they’ll hatch within a week, especially in warm temperature like in the spring or summer.
You can encase the mattress and box spring in a protective cover. In fact, the higher the quality the better it will be able to prevent bed bugs, and if there are any present, they’ll be entombed there and eventually perish from lack of oxygen.
Sure, you can steam or spot-freeze bed bugs and eggs on contact, but it would just be easier to vacuum your floors and surfaces and keep your home as dust free as humanly possible to prevent the population from growing and spreading.
Some people wind up infesting their homes with bed bugs when these creatures jump into their unpacked belongings while staying at a hotel. So check the headboards, which is where bedbugs often hide, but whatever you do, don’t assume you’re alone, because you never really are.
**How clean is your bed? Check out as this brave woman discovers how dirty her mattress really is. It’s so shocking your skin will start to itch.**