louse in the house

Posted on March 8, 2007
Filed Under kids, parenting, suburban joys | 9 Comments

What two words strike fear in the hearts of pathological neat freaks everywhere? HEAD LICE. And these two words were uttered in my house last night after supper. I haven’t been the same since. Restricted airways, nervous laughter, vivid dreams about dragging clothing and comforters and stuffed dogs out to the yard and igniting a bonfire.

The conversation that started this hysteria was innocuous really. It went something like this:

Mommy?
Yes, O?
My second best friend got sent home from school today.
Really, for what? (I imagined some delinquent behavior like biting, or mooning or stealing a Kindergartner’s lunch money.)
Head Lice.
Head Lice? Are your sure?
Yes Mommy. What are head lice?
That’s when I really lost it, began to lose my grip on reality and starting phoning other parents of second graders to confirm that yes, TWO second graders had been banished with bugs. I developed an insane urge to itch, to drag fork tines through my hair and rub my scalp on the banister.

Did you know that a common treatment for head lice is Malathion? I’m serious, the CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases recommends leaving Malathion in your hair for 8 to 12 hours. Talk about the cure being worse than the disease. Just a cursory Google search on Malathion turns up photographs of dead ducks, turtles with tumors and mutant
tadpoles. And I’m going to pour this on my head? Apparently Malathion itself is relatively non-toxic to humans but, when said organophosphate parasympathomimetic (just a name like that makes me think CANCER) becomes degraded or forms impurities during storage and production, the stuff becomes 60% more toxic. (See photo of dead duck, just three days after Malathion was sprayed in the area for mosquito control.)

So when I get over the genotoxicity of the treatment, I will begin the excruciating ritual of removing wallpaper, resanding wood floors and torching non-washables in the backyard in order to ensure the louse have been eradicated once and for all from the Madmarriage residence. But I’m getting ahead of myself, we haven’t a bug among
us…Yet.