There were many times when it wasn’t lice. It wasn’t lice that time a neighbor’s kids had lice, and all of our heads started feeling itchy. It wasn’t lice when the preschool had a lice outbreak. It wasn’t lice when our good friends had lice three times in a row. It wasn’t lice when we got the notice from school that a classmate had lice. There were so many notices, year after year, and they all made us itchy, but none of them were lice.
And then there was the time earlier this month, when one kid just kept having an itchy head. He had an itchy head after wearing a helmet—but he was wearing a helmet! He had an itchy head after playing basketball in the playground—but he was sweaty! He had an itchy head for weeks, but we looked at his head, and we saw nothing but hair. So much hair! He kept scratching his head while he slept. He even scratched while he slept through another kid going full Exorcist in a tent in the middle of the night. He was still scratching after that other kid was finally feeling better.
This time, it would be lice.
I have learned so much about lice in the last few weeks, that I feel like I have gone on a Joseph Campbell-worthy hero’s journey. I have returned from the lice abyss a changed woman. What I know now is that lice isn’t that bad, except when you realize you have it. The idea of lice sent me into a spiral of despair, sitting on the bed in front of the first of many loads of laundry.
Another thing that made me despair: lice are really small. I only found them after very dedicated searching through my son’s hair with a head lamp and a lice comb, bought in an emergency run to CVS. So much hair! So much hair that a systematic approach didn’t seem to help—I only found the lice by using the comb as if it hovered over a Oujia board, letting it come to a place where it felt like there was something outside my field of vision.
Despair, continued: lice eggs are even smaller. I thought none of my children had lice eggs in their hair. The next day, I learned that there were plenty of eggs, as well as tiny, newly-hatched nymphs, everywhere.
This is what lice do–they make more of themselves. An adult louse can lay five or six eggs each day, for as long as thirty days, feeding every few hours on blood. The eggs are stuck onto the hairs themselves with a special lice-y glue. About 10 days later, they hatch; the new nymphs molts several times until they become adults, and the cycle starts all over again.
And here is where my story takes a turn for the better. There was a real hero of this journey, and it was not me. It was a nitpicking professional, who descended on our house with lice combs, special hair products, and, most importantly, reassurance. She went through all of our abundant, disheveled hair with a calm matter-of-factness. Lice are everywhere, she told us. She was going to visit four other families after this.
I will confess that I now consider “the lice lady” a minor deity, so I am willing to believe almost anything she told me. But it turns out many of the things that she told me have been confirmed by various studies. For example—dry your sheets and anything else you’re worried about in the hot dryer, but you don’t have to go bananas with cleaning. Lice really like heads, and they usually move head-to-head.
Indeed, two studies in Australia found that lice rarely end up on pillowcases, and no lice were found on the carpet of a primary school where researchers collected 14,033 lice from the heads of students. The lice lady has made me so resilient in the face of lice that I can type “14,033 lice” while also eating lunch!
Head lice, she said, aren’t a sign that anything is wrong. They don’t carry diseases, they’re just annoying. They are not a sign of dirty hair, or a dirty house. The important thing is to get rid of the lice on the head, which she did by patiently, painstakingly removing them—then coming back a week later to check that she got them all.
When I was in school, kids who got lice were teased for being dirty. A friend, a little older than I am, said that she had lice as a child and her mother shaved her head, which was traumatic for both of them. Lice policies in schools are changing, too, so that kids don’t miss as much school and so that it’s confidential (as much as it can be in a school) when someone does get lice.
My son seems to have returned from the lice journey a hero, too. I heard that he marched into his classroom and announced that he’d gotten to stay home because he had lice. What followed sounded a little bit like what happened when Madeline got appendicitis in the book by Ludwig Bemelmans. In that story, all the rest of the girls started crying in the middle of the night because they wanted their appendix out, too. I don’t think there was any crying at our school, but I imagine there were some silent pleas for a louse of their very own.
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Image by Joana Filipe via Flickr/Creative Commons license