Head lice have taken over my house like squatters
I knew something was wrong when I walked into a house that smelled like tea tree oil and saw my daughters with shower caps on. Boy, has the last week been a nightmare, writes Darren Levin.
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I knew something wasn’t right when I walked into a house that smelled like tea tree oil and saw our daughters – all three of them – sitting on the couch with shower caps on.
Before I got the chance to ask anything the blonde twin piped up, “I got my first lice daddy!” She beamed as if she just lost a tooth.
I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or attempt to summon some kind of lice fairy who would break into the house at night and dry clean all the pillows.
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But just like Santa, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, an economically secure future and other things parents lie to their kids about, the lice fairy is little more than mum and dad in a pair of industrial safety gloves and a hazmat suit heroically attempting to rid their home of humanity’s greatest scourge.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to eradicate head lice before, but they’re about as stubbornly difficult to kill as that evil robot cop from Terminator 2. It’s probably why Scott Morrison’s God smote the Egyptians with them in biblical times. It’s also why lice clinics, offering a 99.2 per cent egg removal guarantee, are pretty popular with parents these days. So popular in fact every clinic within a 10-kilometre radius was completely booked out. We were going to have to go it alone.
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Luckily, we received a government fact sheet from kindergarten explaining how lice is pretty common and easy to remove. Around 30 per cent of Aussie primary kids will contract it at some point, which gave us enough confidence at least to remove the hazmat suits – until we read on.
“Head lice are small, wingless, bloody sucking monsters that feast on your children’s brains through the strands of their perfect hair.”
We decided to keep the gloves on.
The first rule of head lice is don’t talk to anyone about head lice. They’ll tell you all sorts of horror stories about how the treatment didn’t work and they were left with no choice but to shave the entire family’s heads. They even shaved the dog just to be safe.
Given that a Jewish family of skinheads is not a great look, we decided to give an over-the-counter lice removal shampoo a crack. (The time honoured “conditioner and comb” method, which involves combing out the lice over a 10-day period, was probably going to interfere too much with our plans to, you know, live a normal life.)
After two showers each and more hair brushing than the owner of a shetland pony club does in a week, the lice were finally gone for good.
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Or so we thought.
Apparently these crafty beasts like to hatch eggs before you exterminate them, meaning we’d have to repeat this painstaking two-hour process in seven days just to be safe. We’d also have to boil all the hairbrushes, wash all the pillow cases, steam-clean all the scrunchies, and just generally demolish our house if we wanted to make sure our children were 100 per cent lice free.
Then I started panicking that maybe the lice had mutated from their original wingless form as described in the fact sheet. Maybe the lice had directed their parasitic rage towards me.
“Don’t be silly,” my wife quipped. “You don’t have enough hair to have lice.”
It’s the first time I considered male pattern baldness a gift.
Originally published as Head lice have taken over my house like squatters