Head Lice No Big Deal

A four-year-old of mine came home once with head lice. It happens. It’s no big deal. But the case was so bad even the doctor was amazed. “I’ve never actually SEEN so many of the actual creatures"  he mused, fascinated.

The lice look like this:

Not really but what a cute picture huh?And the hatched eggs, also called ‘nits’, look like this:For the most part the nits are what you’ll see, mostly hangin ‘out behind the ears or at the nape of the neck where the temperature is toastiest. They’re white and elliptical in shape and they stick like glue, which is why you have to go get the hellish steel comb to drag along each affected strand of hair.Head lice are of course different from pubic lice, also known as “crabs.” If you’re partnered and you come home with a case of crabs wellllll… you might just have some susplainin’ to do as Ricky used to say to his bride Lucy.But let us look up rather than down here. We could quote Robert Burns’s  “To a Louse” but it’s such unintelligible old Scottish not even Mel Gibson could understand it. We could quote John Donne’s “The Flea” in which the smitten narrator grows jealous of the little critter he assumes has just trundled from his own person to the person of his still-chaste beloved. “It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee!" he gushes and gimme a break I know but what can we say? The man was an innocent, and head over heels to boot.Well lice are innocents too and only doing what God intended them to do, so if they come to your house for heaven’s sake take it in stride. As the Kids Health website says, “Don’t panic; this ISN’T a major drama.”Think of how animals look when they groom one another. Pretty mellow, right? So just use the special shampoo, surrender your scalp to your closest pal and pretend you’re both monkeys. Better than a day spa, yo, and at a fraction of the cost!