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psocopteraPeople with bug squick are advised to avoid the rest of this post.
Liiiiiiiiiice! Long have I dreaded this day. Statistically I suppose I should keep dreading it, since odds are not good that this is our last go-round, but I guess I hope we're getting a lot of the "oh god what do we doooooo" panic out of our systems this time? Anyways, part of why I wanted to post about it was that I always find it reassuring to know that other people have gotten through these things and what it was like, and so, this is what it's been like, so far.
There are a lot of guidelines out there on the web saying you have to bag stuffed animals, use insecticide sprays on your carseats, etc. We ended up going with a professional nit-picking service whose claim is that we do *not* have to do those things, that what we do have to do is put our time and energy into combing combing combing for the next few weeks. I'll report on how this goes.
To back up a little, I found a louse on Junie while combing her hair after her bath last night, and with some looking I found a couple more. Josh checked me and found one on me, and then I spent the next twelve hours scratching my head, except a couple of hours when I was sleeping. After some panicking about putting chemical pesticides on certain medium and very small heads, we called a local nit-picking service this morning (NitWits in Cambridge) and got a same-day appointment to get combed. We were probably there for about three hours in total, about half of which was me. (I apparently have the second-longest hair our nit-picker had ever picked.) Both kids did really well with it (I held Q, Junie just stared transfixed at her movie of choice); it was hard on my neck, but not otherwise unpleasant.
I didn't really know what "having lice" meant, in terms of, like, quantity of lice - is this more like "having mice", where you may only have one mouse, or like "having ants"? Junie yielded something like 8 or 9 live lice and a couple dozen nits, I had five live lice and maybe a dozen nits. I guess these are relatively small numbers reflecting relatively recent infection (probably not more than a month), and if we had a more developed case we could have hundreds. I find these numbers encouraging - they say the chances of transmission/reinfection via furniture/rugs/etc are quite low anyways, but surely it can only help that, if we only had a few dozen nits between us in the first place cemented on our hair where they wanted to be, there can't possibly be *that* many lurking out there on broken-off strands of hair with the chance that a head will be there when they hatch, and apparently live lice are more likely to leave your head if they are crowded, so, I don't know, I feel a little less worried now that we've been leaving a trail of lice through the greater Boston area. Also apparently head-to-head contact is the only substantiated means of transmission. I mean, yes, it only takes one, and I have been busily washing and vacuuming things despite being encouraged to not worry so much about doing that, but, I don't know, I am feeling optimistic right now that if we just work through our combing program we can eradicate the suckers.
Nobody should hug us for another couple of weeks though.
Liiiiiiiiiice! Long have I dreaded this day. Statistically I suppose I should keep dreading it, since odds are not good that this is our last go-round, but I guess I hope we're getting a lot of the "oh god what do we doooooo" panic out of our systems this time? Anyways, part of why I wanted to post about it was that I always find it reassuring to know that other people have gotten through these things and what it was like, and so, this is what it's been like, so far.
There are a lot of guidelines out there on the web saying you have to bag stuffed animals, use insecticide sprays on your carseats, etc. We ended up going with a professional nit-picking service whose claim is that we do *not* have to do those things, that what we do have to do is put our time and energy into combing combing combing for the next few weeks. I'll report on how this goes.
To back up a little, I found a louse on Junie while combing her hair after her bath last night, and with some looking I found a couple more. Josh checked me and found one on me, and then I spent the next twelve hours scratching my head, except a couple of hours when I was sleeping. After some panicking about putting chemical pesticides on certain medium and very small heads, we called a local nit-picking service this morning (NitWits in Cambridge) and got a same-day appointment to get combed. We were probably there for about three hours in total, about half of which was me. (I apparently have the second-longest hair our nit-picker had ever picked.) Both kids did really well with it (I held Q, Junie just stared transfixed at her movie of choice); it was hard on my neck, but not otherwise unpleasant.
I didn't really know what "having lice" meant, in terms of, like, quantity of lice - is this more like "having mice", where you may only have one mouse, or like "having ants"? Junie yielded something like 8 or 9 live lice and a couple dozen nits, I had five live lice and maybe a dozen nits. I guess these are relatively small numbers reflecting relatively recent infection (probably not more than a month), and if we had a more developed case we could have hundreds. I find these numbers encouraging - they say the chances of transmission/reinfection via furniture/rugs/etc are quite low anyways, but surely it can only help that, if we only had a few dozen nits between us in the first place cemented on our hair where they wanted to be, there can't possibly be *that* many lurking out there on broken-off strands of hair with the chance that a head will be there when they hatch, and apparently live lice are more likely to leave your head if they are crowded, so, I don't know, I feel a little less worried now that we've been leaving a trail of lice through the greater Boston area. Also apparently head-to-head contact is the only substantiated means of transmission. I mean, yes, it only takes one, and I have been busily washing and vacuuming things despite being encouraged to not worry so much about doing that, but, I don't know, I am feeling optimistic right now that if we just work through our combing program we can eradicate the suckers.
Nobody should hug us for another couple of weeks though.
