“You’re telling me they can send a man to the moon,” Sandy shouted in Lisa’s ear when she picked up the phone, “but there’s no cure for head lice?”
Sandy was at the end of her rope. This was her first experience with head lice and she was practically cross-eyed from scouring the heads of her four children. In just two days, she spent $75 on shampoo and combs at the drugstore, had done fifteen loads of laundry, suffocated nineteen stuffed animals in a garbage bag, and she was still finding countless little white nits stubbornly clinging to her children’s fine hair.
“Lisa, this is it. I’m getting out the hair clippers,” she threatened, a rising tone of frenzy now present in her voice. Sandy’s boys would look adorable with buzz cuts, but Lisa said she was concerned that the girls might look like they’d been through a war.
“They are in a war, Lisa,” Sandy shrieked, “This is my war…me versus head lice!”
Lisa was a veteran of the head lice war and she’d felt these same battle scars. After weeks of treatment, her own daughter was recently proclaimed “nit free” by the school nurse. At the time, the intensive treatments had put Lisa into the same frenzy that Sandy was now experiencing. There were hours and hours of combing, shampooing, and picking, not to mention the laundry.
“Lisa, you’re drafted. How soon can you get over here and help me comb the kids’ hair?” Sandy implored.
“Ummm…Sandy…. I have a dentist appointment right now that I really don’t want to miss. Gotta go!” Lisa hung up the phone, sweat beginning to form on her brow. Keeping her secret hidden was not easy, especially when General Sandy was on the warpath. How much longer could she keep this ruse going?
Lisa figured she’d caught the head lice from her daughter. She took as many precautions as possible during the treatment, carefully following the directions on the shampoo box and tips she got online from other parents. Lisa wore plastic gloves when nit-picking, washed every communal towel, and vacuumed every inch of upholstery. But one night, bending over to give her a daughter a last goodnight kiss, Lisa watched in slow motion as their hair gently fell together on the pillow. It rested there for just a few minutes, which was probably just enough time for a louse to scramble from one head to another. With no other explanation available, Lisa had nothing else to blame but an innocent bedtime kiss.
It turned out having head lice wasn’t all that bad. It certainly was not the worst of the contagious diseases Lisa had caught from her kids over the years. Pink eye was itchy and there was a lot of what the doctor termed “discharge” oozing out of her eye. The stomach flu she caught from her son last Christmas was practically unforgiveable. Sure, the lice shampoo had a nasty chemical smell that burned her throat but the hour her husband Brian spent combing through her hair actually felt kind of nice.
“Isn’t this what marriage is really about?” she asked Brian one afternoon as he picked diligently through her hair looking for nits. Brian responded with silence, remembering that he was the one who had to administer her eye drops back when she had pink eye.
The biggest problem with head lice was that Lisa was afraid to admit it to any of her friends, including Sandy. The stomach flu got her lots of sympathetic messages on Facebook but she had a feeling that if she updated her status with something like, “Hubby only found four nits in my hair tonight!” she would get nothing but silence from her Facebook audience. There’s a stigma that goes along with head lice that even enlightened intelligent Lisa couldn’t ignore. If you got head lice, you must be filthy dirty and live with varmints. Her hairdresser told her that lice love a clean head more than a dirty one. A Google search dug up hundreds of websites proclaiming that head lice aren’t dangerous and don’t spread disease. Still, she was ashamed.
The next time Sandy called, she was feeling victorious, “Those little buggers have raised the white flag, Lisa. I’ve won the war!”
“Really, Sandy? Those bugs are tenacious. As soon as you think they’re gone, there’s one still lurking behind an ear just waiting to introduce his whole louse family to your kid’s head. You better keep checking,” Lisa told her.
Sandy wouldn’t let any negativity get in the way of her victory celebration, “Lisa, it’s over. The war was won. By me. Not the lice.”
The truth was Lisa was jealous. The shampoo and combing hadn’t been enough. Her head was still filled with little white eggs, just waiting to hatch and drive her insane with itching. Sandy must have some lice-killing tricks up her sleeve that Lisa hadn’t tried. Maybe it was time to admit the truth.
After a moment of silence, Lisa said, “Sandy, do you still have those hair clippers? I think I need a new look. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
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