"Don't let the .... bite"

I'm not sure if I have them. So I cannot confirm or deny their existence. But my flatmate claims that I have them, and that she wakes up every morning with bites and red patches on her back(side).

So I've been googling bedbugs to see if there are signs of their presence I can spot. And surprisingly, they are more common than we think. In fact, most people probably have it, but live with them without realising that they are under the mattress seams, hiding in crevices in the wall, or living in the wood of the bedframe. Some people are especially allergic to them, and show symptoms whenever they are bitten.

And one of these people happen to be a friend who moved into the spare room of my apartment less than two weeks ago. It's a temporary arrangement, or so I'd like to think; temporary until she finds a place of her own. Almost immediately she started to complain about bedbugs, and now and then she would tell me how serious the problem is. When I came back from a weekend trip to the US, within five minutes of stepping through the door, she complained again about them.

I'm lost as what I should do. I've lived in this place for over a year, and I've had the bed she's now sleeping on for (just) over two. And I've never had a problem with bedbugs. She started to show me bits and pieces of what look like pebbles (or maybe even little box filling) to me, and she claims they are faeces of the bugs. Which happen to be in a leading toward the edge of the bed.
I said I'll get sprays, which I did today.

So at the big hardware store, I asked a middle aged man who works at the store what I could do about bedbugs. He showed me a spray product, which he said is effective if I just spray it all over the bedroom and around the bed. "Do you see them?" he asked. No, I've never seen them. It's my flatmate who claims they exist, but I'm not even sure if she's seen them actually crawling around.

"You can see them. They're small and red," he said, and with that he shuddered. "Do you have a cat?" I wondered how he knew I had a cat, and what that has to do with bedbugs. I do know that my roommate is somewhat allergic to cats and cat hair, and she takes antihistamine to control her allergies. "Well, maybe that's got something to do with it." He was called away before I could ask any more questions.

I'm not sure what to believe and not one step closer to finding out whether I do have bedbugs. But I just spent some $20 dollars and listening to complaints about an infestation which does not actually affect me at all. This morning my roommate actually suggested fumigating the whole house to kill the bedbugs. How much would that be, I wonder. And how effective would that be, I ask. Maybe they'll go away for a while. But with time, perhaps weeks, perhaps days, they will be back. Because they are everywhere.

Easiest, really, is she moved out and found a place that's bedbug free. "Good luck", the man at the store said to me before he rushed away. Indeed, given the extent of the problem throughout North American, good luck.