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Dear Suzanne
I, too, have had the rare and wonderful privilege of dealing with a lice infestation. But, sooooo much worse than that
was the time we got SCABIES. My boyfriend was complaining of itchy feet after borrowing a pair of boots from a friend; after a few weeks, I was itching, too - as was my son
and just about anyone who had visited our house. Now when you're diagnosed with scabies, the cure is to douse yourself in medicated bug poison, wash everything in your house,
and lock up anything that can't be thrown in a washing machine into a garbage bag with more bug poison. If you have somehow managed to miss any of them, you have to go through
the entire process over again. And again. And again.
In the meantime, you are experiencing uncontrollable itching 24 hours a day. This is SO much worse than poison ivy
or anything of that sort. Trust me on this - I used to get poison ivy so bad as a child that my entire body would be covered in an inch or two of welts, my eyes swollen shut,
with only tears of agony escaping. THAT would have been a HUGE improvement over the scabies! The worst part was that, ultimately, I would say it took at least a YEAR before we
were in the clear. Scabies, BTW, are where the term "seven-year itch" comes from - I can totally understand why. –Laura
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Dear Suzanne,
It was my son's 7th birthday. His father (my ex-husband) had just dropped him off at my house and I just barely had
time to get him cleaned up before we were due at the local pizza-party palace for his big birthday bash.
I was washing his thick, curly hair when I noticed bugs walking
around on his scalp! Horrible, horrible, horrible, horrors. I was sick to my stomach. I called an acquaintance who was both a neighbor and a kindergarten teacher. She had
shampoo on hand, of course, and dropped it off in record time. I washed those bugs right out of his hair. We went to the party and I kept my mouth shut. But I spent the night
after the party washing bedding and vacuuming the entire house.
I was up all night. Then we spent the next day trying to get the nits out of that gorgeous hair of his.
I would have had it cut off (beautiful red curls that they were), but no barber would touch him. We even had to wait outside at the dr.'s office when we picked up a
prescription for more shampoo. The best part, though, was that there were no lice on me or at my house. His father, however, had to get them out of his own hair by himself!
–Irwin
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Dear Suzanne,
I know they are bugs to you, but they are my bread and butter! I am an entomologist @ Mosquito Management Services. My
worst experience with insects was with African honey bees in Lambwe Valley, Kenya. Our land rover hit a log in which the bees were nesting. They quickly swarmed all over us
and we had to abandon the 'rover. One individual was stung 160 times based upon stingers removed.
If you had to choose between exterminating all insects or keeping all,
which would it be? Remember the value of pollination of plants, the food chain, the useful products (honey, silk), the beauty (butterflies). Lowly cockroaches have proven to
be valuable animals for medical research. There are other positives and negatives, but insects can be considered the dominant class of animals on the earth based on numbers
and diversity. We probably couldn't destroy them anyway without destroying ourselves. But its OK to despise head lice [As you may know, archeologists found head lice on
ancient Egyptian mummies]. –Lyman
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Oh Suzanne,
You brought back memories that I hadn't recollected in many years. Head lice ... they struck after I visited my cousins
for a weekend. I was very young ... my mother was frustrated ... the medicated shampoo smelled horrible ... and to top it all off I felt like a chimpanzee. My mother would sit
and run this very fine toothed comb through my thick, naturally curly (very, very thick, very curly) hair stopping now and again to remove the "nits" from hair
shafts!! To this day (and it has been 50+ years) I cannot see apes or monkeys grooming one another without thinking of Mom "grooming" me when I had head lice and
"nits". –Annie
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