No I definitely do this too. And then first thing when I get in I pull sheets off corners of mattress, lift the mattress and shine the flashlight on my phone and do a good inspection to make sure there aren’t any!
I AM SO GLAD I AM NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO DOES THIS!
My husband used to think I was over the top because ever since we've been together, it's been a fear that we would encounter one at a hotel. He would fly out sometimes to conferences and not check his sheet for bed bugs, and I would be like, "HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO OUR FAMILY?"
And then.
The first house we moved into here in the Midwest (not our current one), I was unpacking a box one day and looked over on the windowsill. "Huh," I thought, "that kind of looks like a bed bug."
I squinted at it and horror movie strings started playing in my mind as I realized that it was, indeed, a dead bed bug on my window sill and I WANTED TO DIE.
We called Terminix but the unfortunate thing about bed bugs and their gross ass breeding cycle is that, unless you're infested, you're not going to know right away if you have just *one* or if there are more LIVING IN YOUR HOUSE.
So for a month I used passive monitoring techniques and spent the first month adjusting to life in the Midwest, looking up the sky and seeing Canadian geese flying over me, and then immediately think, "DO WE HAVE BED BUGS?" I was not fun to live with during this period. I was constantly googling bed bugs. I was a mess.
Spoiler alert, we didn't have them, and on the follow-up visit, our exteriminator speculated that the dead one I saw was from a former treatment and that we would have known the first couple of nights had the bed bugs been hiding.
so tl;dr my husband no longer thinks I am crazy for checking, and I will check for them until the end of time when I am senile, and the only things my mind can recognize are the creepy music from the "We're in this together!!!" commercials and BED BUGS.
Ok back to work, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
