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February 28, 2006
My Lousy Friend
Recently one of my close friends was afraid that one of her boys had lice. A note had come home from school stating that lice were going around and instructing parents to examine their kids for signs of infestation. My friend realized that one of her sons had been scratching his head a lot, so she combed through his hair and to put it delicately, things were amiss. She saw a little dirt in his hair (hair that she washes every night with Publix Tear-Free shampoo), and then she thought she saw what appeared to be an albino flea scurrying between his flaxen locks.
She’d never heard of an albino flea before, but who is to say they do not exist? There are albino people and snakes, so surely albino fleas are not out of the realm of possibility. Furthermore, that particular child had been cuddling with the flea-ridden devil-mutt a lot,
so the albino flea theory made more sense than the fact that her sanitary son might have lice. At any rate, she did not have much time to make a diagnosis because the carpool came at that moment, so she shooed the boys out the door and decided to do some further research.
First my friend re-read the letter from the school. It attempted to placate nervous parents by stating that having lice “is very common in schools and it has become widespread in the past few years. It is not considered a sign of uncleanliness or
neglect.” However, it also stressed that if “tiny, white egg cases” were found on a child’s head, he or she “may not return to school until they have been treated.”
She relaxed a bit. She had not seen anything that could be described as a “white egg case,” whatever that was. However, there was no denying that she had seen something unusual on her child’s head, so she decided to investigate further.
My friend found herself in an odd situation. Up until now, she had felt free to call up her friends and ask advice about all sorts of personal issues without fear of being judged. How soon did you start having sex after you had the baby? Am I the only woman not using a Rabbit vibrator? Does this skirt look expensive, or can you tell it came from Target? Can you get your husband to tell my husband that his vasectomy was painless? Is it illegal to take a Darvocet before I get a bikini wax?
This topic, however, was off limits. She felt that if she asked even the most innocuous questions about lice, people might immediately suspect her of harboring vermin and wonder whether she was truly devoted to maintaining a hygienic household. She hated to call the pediatrician; during flu season it was the most sociable place in town. She’d probably run into everyone she knew, and they’d ask why she was there, and it would be uncomfortable for everyone.
So my friend turned to Google, and her albino flea theory was shot to hell. Her son had lice.
On the up side, the article she located about lice had a pleasingly supercilious tone, suggesting that parents and school administrators who try to isolate lice-ridden children are usually overreacting. It emphasized that the appearance of lice was not a sign of neglect. Some parts of the article were unintentionally humorous, as when the authors noted that the presence of a few lice provides the parent with a welcome
opportunity to spend some quality time with her child, cuddling him and picking nits out of the hair. That was certainly putting a positive spin on the situation.
So that evening, my friend treated her son with some lice shampoo, and then they snuggled in front of the TV, watching American Idol, admiring Ace’s cool shirts and cheering for Chris and Taylor. She divided his hair into sections and combed each section carefully with two different types of special combs.
Eventually the show was over but the combing was nowhere near done. At this point my friend tried to draw on the “perseverance and levity” the authors recommended as part of the lice treatment. It was one thing to comb nits and egg cases while watching TV on a school night, but now that it was past time the child went to bed, the endless combing was cutting into the precious hours she had left to finish the fascinating article on homing pigeons she had been reading in the The New Yorker. My good friend finally finished with the offending son’s head, and sent him off to bed. The next day she gave each of her other kids a prophylactic shampoo treatment. For now, her home is lice-free.
Will you keep her dirty secret? I wouldn’t want her to be shunned at Jazzercise.
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January 19th, 2007 at 6:46 pm, My Tiny Kingdom » Get Me Out Of Here! Says:
[...] As I drove home, I called Bill at the office to let him know what was going on. He wasn’t nearly as worked up as I was, and that made me furious until I realized that he had not witnessed the initial washing and combing during Attack of the Lice Part 1. Nor had he ever washed an entire set of bedding, from mattress cover to comforter to pillowcases, much less four sets. [...]
February 5th, 2008 at 9:26 am, My Tiny Kingdom » Porter’s Week In Review Says:
[...] personally would not like to have a bird sitting on my head, but Porter has had nastier creatures [...]