Memories of Lice

As I sit in my own house watching my husband carefully keep his distance today, as I talk to my massage therapist about my next appointment and sense a hesitation in her voice about working on me, I am reminded of episodes of lice when my children were much, much younger. The dreaded letter home about a nit found in some child’s head was enough to send shivers of panic through me. I’m sure everyone dealt with lice at one time or another. I’ll never forget combing my own hair one morning after a shampoo to find living bugs that looked like fleas but didn’t hop, putting them in a plastic bag, and taking them to the pediatrician’s office only to learn that they were indeed lice. So that’s what they looked like! Getting rid of lice meant using caustic poisonous shampoos on the one obviously infested, but also on everyone else in the family as a precaution. It meant literally tearing your house apart to clean and chase those eggs that could have been laid anywhere. It meant not coming in contact with another person who was infested. In a particularly long episode, we were sure that it was the Indian child’s father with the turban who was harboring the recurring lice in his long hair. It seemed like there were times when we would never be lice free.

But lice were little bugs that were real and, as annoying as they were, they never really did much besides make your head itch and make the school officials go crazy. There is no radiation bug to chase. No one can even tell me what the real danger is. What does exposure really mean? As I go into my kitchen with my long white latex gloves on to make a cup of tea, just what is it that I’m trying to avoid spreading? I have this image of a little odd-shaped bug that over the next few days will gradually shrink in size so that by mid-week it just disappears out of sight. My dogs haven’t sniffed out the radiation bug, haven’t yet learned to steer clear of me, and you know what, I’m just not going to tell them about it.