Head Lice: It Just Takes Time

We were sitting out on the back deck and Allie, my wife, grabbed Ginger, my daughter, and said, "Come here and let me look at you." And just kind of looked at her hair and there they were, a massive lice infestation. What happens is, it just freaks you out. It really does. It's a total freak out because it just seems so gross. First thing we thought is, "Oh my god. Fumigate the house. Burn things. Wash things." You know, it's a meltdown. But when you do your homework, you find out that you don't really need to do that. You should wash pillowcases and sheets, obviously. These things can't live off of a human. They're going to die. So generally speaking, vacuuming is fine. We just did a great vacuum job and then threw out the filter. You know, we felt that was kind of the way to go. It's really not that complicated. You go and you buy some special over-the-counter lice shampoo. You can get it prescribed by your doctor but we didn't go that route. You go to the drugstore and you ask the pharmacist, "What do you use for lice?" They'll tell you exactly what and the treatment's pretty simple. You wash their hair with the stuff. You've got to follow whatever the instructions were. There's a little bit of a procedure to that. Then you start nit-picking and lice combing. When you buy this stuff, you go to the store, and you buy a little silver comb with tiny little tines. You put your kid's head in your lap with a towel and you just start going through almost strand by strand. You grab a little bit of hair, pull it back to the roots so you can see down there. You'll be able to see the lice wherever they are. You comb it out. You get the lice or the nits or the eggs. You wipe it off on the towel and this just goes on and on and on. And it takes a really long time. You have to be patient with it. There's no short way to comb through every strand of your kid's hair. What I know now about lice is that it's not fun but it's not really that big of a deal. The other thing that I wish I knew is that finding a few nits and lice in your kid's scalp after you've done the shampoo treatment is normal. So after you use that you get a lot of them out and they rinse out in the shower. The ones that are left are dying or about to die. If you kind of have a gut feeling, if a week later there still seems to be active infestation, I suggest you do another treatment, which we had to do. The kids had them that bad, that first time. So we had, a week later we had to do a second treatment. Because apparently the stuff you use is strong enough that you don't want to use it too often. The formula for lice is simple. It's do the shampoo and then spend hours and hours and hours over the course of the next week combing your kid's hair with this little comb. It's not complicated. You just have to do ... it just takes a lot of time.