Life After Lice! (2011 End of Summer Update)

As we approach the beginning of the school year I cringe at the thought of the dreaded little creatures I now know inhabit my child’s school (as well as most other ones). Ignorance truly was bliss last year. I had no idea of the prevalence of lice in elementary schools or the likelihood that my child would be exposed to it. Perhaps growing up in a household where we never had lice and never knew anyone that had it created an unrealistic expectation.

The funny thing is that when we had lice I turned to my friends in my moments of despair. It was only then that I learned that two of my closest childhood friends had lice when they were younger. I never knew! Then again, why would I. Even now people don’t talk about having lice – unless you are new inductee to the lice infested club. Once you’re in the club a wide array of information becomes available to you. I can’t help but wonder if we’d be better off if that information was part of our daily conversation instead of when a child comes home with lice.

I’m still a little perturbed that my school district does NOT notify parents when your child has been exposed to lice. Perhaps if they did I might have looked up preventative measures and would not still itch at the least provocation! At any rate, I am determined to share what I learned and make sweet lemonade out of that nasty, moldy, disgusting batch of lemons which was my experience with lice.

My daughter already knows that her beautiful, luscious curly hair will be pulled back and smelling like peppermint every day she is in school. I don’t care that her friends might think she smells like a candy cane! We have a friend who has amazing hair. She’s only about 8 but her hair is that of legend! I aways wondered why her mother never left her hair out. As a matter of fact, I remember thinking what was the point of having such amazing hair if you never left it loose. Now I know!

On my end, I have destroyed my hair. Thankfully it is chin length and fairly thick. I still remember the first day I went into a salon after treating my own hair for lice and combing through my naturally coarse hair with the lice comb. The stylist almost fell over. She was shocked at how broken and damaged my hair was. It didn’t help that I didn’t leave myself enough time to stay for a deep conditioning treatment. I tried to explain myself, but she clearly had not had a customer who had broken off half of her hair trying to comb out lice.

If you have black hair and get lice, I’m not sure what to tell you. The only saving grace for my daughter is that she is of mixed ethnicity and her hair is more like her father’s. I was in between relaxers so I had a significant amount of new growth which was coarse hair. There are new heat treatments that will kill the lice and the nits but you still need to comb through the hair to remove the remnants and check for any missed ones.

The lice combs don’t work for my hair. I just had to decide that less hair was better than more lice. Here is an opportunity for a savvy inventor to come up with a special treatment for black hair, because we do get lice and shaving out heads is not always a viable option. If there is a treatment out there already, please let me know so I can share it.

I’m going to be visiting with a local lice treatment center in the coming weeks. I will bring back some tips for managing lice and lice prevention. Here’s hoping you have a happy August – free of creepy little critters!

Aging Flawlessly

As the youngest of my older brothers turns 40 today, it makes me think about the new age demographic I will be joining in a few years. My younger guy friend asked me how I felt about turning 40. I told him that it didn’t bother me since I hear that’s when women are in their prime. I also said that by 40 I hope that I will be financially fabulous (not having money woes because all of my bills are paid, I am debt free, have a hefty, healthy and diverse investment portfolio and my family is all financially free as well) and doing what I love as a career.

To tell the truth, my 30′s have been pretty hellish. If anything they are teaching me how to navigate life’s ups and downs with grace and acceptance. I’m still a pupil at Life’s Let it Flow Academy, but I’m at least a sophomore.  One of the things I’ve come to terms with is that I can’t turn back the clock, and that I don’t want to. I have a finite amount of time on this Earth in this body. The way I skid into the casket at the end will be an indication of the life I lived. I’ve already aged myself from years of obesity, but I am working on reversing those effects.

I know stress is a silent killer which ages you prematurely. I’m doing what I can to flow like water. Stuff happens. My goal is to take that stuff and learn from it without letting it steal my power. The episode with the lice was a killer, but once I turned the corner I promised myself that I would take what I learned and make a difference in someone else’s life. I truly believe that I had to live through it to be able to be in contribution to others.

That’s what I’m learning about life. If I am blessed enough to wake up, there will be a series of obstacles that will challenge me and a series of things that will delight me. Neither is good nor bad, it just is – and the important thing is what I make of each moment. Letting go of trying to control every obstacle in my life allows me to go with the flow, listen, learn and embrace life.

Aging flawlessly means not wasting time worrying about each new gray hair, dark spot, added pound or wrinkle. I look upon them as wisdom badges. Each one tells me a little bit more about who I am, how I’m flowing in life and what adjustments I can make to be the healthiest in mind, body and spirit. I am supposed to get older and eventually die. That’s just the way it works. I won’t fight against it, I will flow with it…going as flawlessly as possible.

Life After Lice! Update (Special Feature)

Maybe it’s the subject matter or just the fatigue from the battle, but it’s been tough to get motivated to sit down and write this post. I promised myself that I would continue this journey and share what I learned with other parents out there, and so I will. It’s been a blissful few weeks since the little buggers swooped into our lives creating turmoil and distress. I am incredibly grateful that we have not seen any sign of lice since Day 14 (the 14th day after I noticed lice in my daughter’s hair and began treatment).

To be honest the maintenance regiment at this point is minimal but I still feel resistant to completing it. This is totally emotional. The thing that sucks about lice is that once you’ve had it you don’t forget it. You become hypersensitive to opportunities for head to head contact (primary way they are transferred from one person to another), kind of like once you learned there was a Boogie Man. As a parent of a young child that means play dates, birthday parties, ball pits, slumber parties – you name it.

The problem is that you can’t wrap your child’s head up in plastic wrap to prevent transmission.  Well, I guess you could but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it! My good news is that I discovered a local company called  Lice Lifters in Lafayette Hill, PA who were able to educate me, check my daughter’s head and offer an outlet for support.

We had a terrific experience at Lice Lifters. The entire process of checking my daughter’s head lasted less than an hour. The owners, Michele and Ilene, worked on my daughter while entertaining her with books and great conversation.

Lice Lifters - Michele & Ilene

They showed me the best method of combing through her hair, suggested a micro-grooved comb (the one I used originally didn’t have micro-grooved teeth) and explained what I should be looking for when doing future head checks.

They had a microscope in the treatment room (which was set up nicely like a salon, not intimidating or scary) so they could examine any possible nits (lice eggs). During one tense and fascinating moment, Michele thought she might have found a viable nit (If I recall correctly that was the terminology she used) and checked it out under the microscope. She let me look through the microscope which revealed what she called  a “thread bug.” I remember making a yuck face upon hearing the name, but she quickly explained that it’s just a piece of curled up thread that looks like a nit to the naked eye. Sure enough, when I looked through the microscope I saw an innocent little piece of thread.

I learned that understanding whether or not you have viable nits or actual lice in your hair is critical to knowing how to proceed with your treatment. I want to take a second to mention that as a parent I was thrilled at how the ladies handled my daughter. She started crying on the way to Lice Lifters because she didn’t want anyone else going through her hair.

Since I disclosed to her schools that she had lice she has been checked repeatedly by her school nurse, which I did know. What I didn’t know was that during one of the checks (with a substitute nurse) she felt like the nurse was too rough. She explained that the nurse pushed her head this way and that and that it hurt her. I asked if she let the nurse know that she was hurting her. My daughter said she didn’t.

It hurt my heart that she didn’t come right home and tell me about it . It hurt my pride that she kept getting pulled out of class to be checked, when no one ever notified me from either of her school programs that lice was going around. It’s not my goal to get caught up in the merits of notification as a way to prevent the spread of lice. I do, however, have every intention of coming back to this point at a later time.

The team at Lice Lifters were a balm on my wounded mommy heart. My daughter did great, even though she didn’t want to be there. The ladies were gentle, thorough, sensitive to our needs and most of all informative. They explained what products they were using (their own line called The Nit Nanny) and why they believed them to be effective.

Combing Through Checking for Nits & Lice

Thankfully they didn’t find one single nit! Michele did caution me that nothing is 100%. We discussed a treatment plan in case any nits were missed.  The treatment would  kill the lice larvae before they could grow to egg laying maturity. I was to complete the lice solution treatment twice over a period of a week and then do a combing head check once  a week. I loved that the products are pesticide free and it was easy to complete the treatment.

Another wonderful tip the ladies shared with us was the recommended  hairstyle to prevent the lice. Who knew? Maybe that seems silly, but I NEVER considered that by keeping my child’s hair tied back we might have avoided this. Now I’m not saying it’s the end all, but every bit helps.  Ilene was super cute with my daughter.  She offered to do her hair in, “the Jasmine style” and let her pick out her colors for the hair bands they would use.

The Jasmine

The Jasmine - Rear View

My daughter still hates having her head checked and probably always will. It hasn’t been a great experience, but I’m hearing it’s a common one.  We complete our daily maintenance with a mint spray which is supposed to deter lice. My daughter thinks she smells like a candy cane and has fun running around asking people to smell her hair (can you see me cringing over here). I guess it’s great that she’s not embarrassed and is actually proud of how she looks and smells since she having lice.

We  went to Lice Lifters to see what they did there and to find out if I could learn a thing or two about the realities of life after lice. The experience was incredibly positive. Thankfully, we didn’t have to have the full treatment for active lice since she was lice and nit free. We learned a great deal and the ladies finished off our visit with a snack for my daughter (and coffee for me), which is always a hit! The trip did set me back another $61 in hair care products, but where I am sitting it is worth it.

My little one was thrilled to leave, but it had little to do with Lice Lifters and a ton to do with this being a traumatic experience she would like to forget!  I have asked the Michele and Ilene to supply me with information about lice so I can continue to bring you information that might be helpful. I realize that lice is still taboo, but I believe that with increased education less families will suffer as we did.

I’m still itchy when I write and talk about this issue.

Maybe that will change one day…but if not, I’ll itch and I’ll write.

You can find out more about Lice Lifters at http://www.licelifters.com/.

Life After Lice! – (Special Feature)

This very long special feature is a departure from my daily blog. From time to time I’ll have a special feature, but for the most part my post will be short and sweet. Enjoy!

Head lice… one of the dirtiest four letter words I’ve ever met. Dirty in the stress, pain and torture the little buggers can wreak on a household. Not necessarily physical pain either. The mere mention of lice can send friends into a scratching fit. It’s no wonder there is such stigma and misinformation surrounding these critters. Let’s start with debunking myth number 1: Black people don’t get lice. Just in case you are wondering (see picture below), I am Black and yes…I got lice. I get the myth. This is my first case of lice and I’m 37 years old. If you had asked me a month ago I would have said that Black people probably don’t get lice.

Olive Oil Treatment

I took this photo as I was writing this post. What’s with the shower cap? Well, just as the mere mention of lice will get others scratching, thinking about it got me scratching. I’ve been scratching for days even though I believe I’ve been nit (lice eggs) free for over a week. The itching was so bad that I broke the skin on my scalp resulting in several large scabs. The chemical treatment I used to kill the lice was harsh and likely caused dry scalp.  The rest is probably psychosomatic. I am giving myself an olive oil treatment (olive oil applied directly to the scalp and left on under a shower cap for a few hours).  The olive oil will act as a moisturizer and will hopefully alleviate some of the itching I’m feeling.

The good news for me is that the itching is the result of a dry scalp and not an active infestation. If you’ve never been exposed to lice this entire concept might be hard to imagine. I will do my best to let you take a few steps in my shoes. Let me say right here that I am lucky. I’m lucky that I only have one child and this is our first exposure. My heart goes out to parents who have multiple children and who may have had to go through this horror show multiple times.

It is not my aim to scare parents, especially those who are newly being initiated into this lovely club. I’m simply sharing my story. One that could have had a happier ending if I was better educated about the signs, treatment options and realities of lice.  Let me say this right now, if you are just discovering your child has lice…take a deep breath. Myth #2: Lice are dangerous. Lice are not really dangerous and there is no evidence that they transmit diseases. They are a pain in the behind, and for some who have an allergic reaction to the saliva they can cause your scalp to be very itchy. They are however a nuisance that cause embarrassment and ultimately are something you will need to treat.

Myth #3: There is one preferred treatment option. What blew my mind was the scores of information about what to do once you determine your child (or you) have lice. I found treatments involving mayonnaise, olive oil, chemicals, tea tree oil, blow drying, flat ironing, nit-picking and on and on. If I could have done it all over again I would have chosen a natural treatment instead of the chemical one. Some offer that head lice have become resistant to the chemical treatments. https://identify.us.com/head-lice/head-lice-FAQS/are-head-lice-resistant.html. I would have chosen a natural treatment because I’d prefer to avoid harsh chemicals if there is an alternative.  Now I see that there are many alternatives, so take a moment to check out your local resources and put a call out to your parenting circle to see if anyone has gone through lice treatment. I got the best information from another mom who had been through it. The hour you spend will likely save you time and money on the back-end.

Let’s get down to it. My daughter had complained of itchy head on Monday. On Tuesday she said that a friend had seen a bug in her hair. My kid has a ton of hair! She is a beautiful blend of my Haitian traits and her father’s Guyanese ones – she got his hair. Long, beautiful, curly hair that was below her shoulders and constantly garnered compliments. That hair quickly became the bane of my existence. I figured with hair like hers it wouldn’t be unusual for a bug to get caught in the curls. That night I decided to grease her scalp and thoroughly wash her hair.  Her hair type doesn’t need grease, but I was going to use it as a scalp conditioning treatment and then wash it out.

Right after dinner I sat her down with a jar of hair grease and started applying the grease to her scalp. After a few minutes I found “the bug”, or so I thought. After the second and then the third bug my heart sunk and I realized that there was a major problem.  I took a second to look up lice and unfortunately realized that the little bugger I just squished looked just like the one in the picture online.  Based on the information I scanned on the website I went back to check the front of her hair. When I made the part and spread the hair it looked like someone has sprinkled a handful of teeny sesame seeds onto her hair close to the scalp. Heart sinking further, I realized that those were nits.

I promptly ran to the pharmacy and asked for help in picking the right treatment for my child. The pharmacy representative showed me the treatment options – chemical and natural. I asked a few questions including was the natural treatment as effective as the chemical one.  She didn’t have a great deal of knowledge about treating lice or the efficacy of chemical vs. natural treatment. I scooped up the complete chemical set, which ran me about $26, and headed home grossed out but determined not to alarm my daughter.

This kit came with three components: 1) Chemical shampoo that you leave on for 10 minutes 2) a gel and comb which are to be used to comb the nits off the hair and 3) a spray for anything you can’t throw in the washer like mattresses, couches, etc.  I lined my floor with newspaper as directed, sat her in front of her favorite television program and started to get down to the application of the shampoo at 8:30 pm. My daughter’s bedtime is 8 pm so this was a huge bonus for her – staying up late AND getting to watch TV. I’m not sure what I thought was going to happen next, but I was pretty sure I’d be done in a couple of hours.

Let’s call that myth #4: Treatment is quick and easy. Treatment was HELL! Note to parents – read the instructions carefully. In hindsight I used only a fraction of the amount of shampoo that I was supposed to use on my daughter due to the length of her hair. That might account for the fact that after I rinsed out the shampoo and began combing through her hair I was still picking out LIVE lice. The shampoo should have killed them, but I think with my application it just slowed them down. I combed out approximately 9 live ones. The recommended procedure for going through your child’s hair is to separate the hair into small sections and use a lice comb (please do your research on this as there are many different brands of combs and different techniques) to comb out the remaining lice and nits.

The thing I didn’t know is that the lice glue their eggs onto individual strands of hair making it easy to distinguish them from dandruff and very difficult to get off. The lice combs didn’t work for my daughter’s hair, it was too fine. The comb would slide right down the piece of hair and over the nit, leaving it stuck firmly in place. I had read some people just use their nails to pick them off, hence the term nitpicking. I have a new appreciation for that word. I spent 7 hours, yes…that’s right 7 hours that first night separating, combing and picking lice and nits out of my daughter’s hair. I finished her hair at 3:30 am.

Ok, so maybe some of you are saying that’s not terrible. Yeah, it might not have been if I still didn’t have to put my exhausted five-year old into a shower and then ask her to wait while I stripped her bed, sprayed it with lice killer (something else I wouldn’t do again) and remade it with clean sheets. I got her into bed about 4:30 am.  Then yup, you guessed it – I had to begin the treatment on myself (which they don’t recommend as you can’t see all over your head). On one of my bathroom breaks whiled doing my daughter’s hair I ventured a peek into my own hair. To say I was defeated to see a little critter CRAWLING around when I parted the front of my hair would be the understatement of the year.

It was bad enough to realize that my daughter had a case of lice, but I had already used all of my physical and emotional resources keeping her calm as I tugged, parted and picked at her hair. My heart broke when she asked me, “Mommy, is this my fault?” I wanted to cry. Thankfully I had the presence of mind not to verbalize how grossed out I was. I explained that she got it from someone else who had lice, that we’d never know who and that lice actually like clean hair so there was nothing to be ashamed about. Too bad I wasn’t listening to my own counsel.

I was wondering how and why this had happened to me, but I hadn’t yet fully begun to appreciate the long hard road ahead.  I stayed up to treat myself (which took 3 hours) and make the appropriate notification calls to her school and extracurricular programs. I notified them that she had lice and that she wouldn’t be attending school the next day.  I put myself to bed around 8:30 am Wednesday morning, exhausted but thinking that life was going to return to normal when I woke up. Was I ever wrong!  Once you discover you have lice you need to bag up all the stuff that you or your child came in contact with - stuffed animals, pillows, blankets, etc. I was advised to leave the stuff I couldn’t wash in bags for two weeks in the garage until all the lice would die and to launder everything else in hot water and hot dryer.

Bagging Up

By the time I was done I had 12 trash bags in the middle of my living room. Three of them contained my daughter’s stuffed animals, toys and other items that could not be washed.  As if it wasn’t bad enough to subject my child to sleep deprivation and hours sitting still in a chair having her hair combed out (for the first time in her life), I now had to take away her sleeping buddies. That first night we slept on mattresses with no pillows or blankets, only sheets.  Bless her soul that she didn’t cry about having lice or the hair torture, she only cried because I had to take away her stuffed animals and wouldn’t give them back for two whole weeks. The other 9 bags were full of laundry, curtains, towels and comforters. One thing that sucked but was unavoidable was that I had just done my laundry and had several loads sitting on my bed. Well, all those clean clothes went right into those black bags to be re-laundered. I also had to quarantine myself us to certain areas of our place so we wouldn’t risk transferring the lice.

On day 1 I used the comb that came in the treatment kit. It was a plastic comb which I DO NOT recommend. My daughter was already overdue for a haircut but after using the comb she had nothing but frayed ends. By day 2 I was back at the pharmacy purchasing a metal lice comb, which was approximately $9.

So now I have a kid with beyond shoulder length hair that is terribly frayed and tangled at the ends – a nightmare to manage with a fine-toothed metal comb. My daughter’s hair has been a very sensitive topic in my family. As I mentioned it is beautiful and almost everyone in the family was against me cutting it (at all).  She’d only had two trims in her 5 plus years and I was afraid to cut it so I thought I’d take her to get it professionally cut. Not with lice or nits in it. So I was left with little choice but to move forward.

This is the after shot

You might think the next days would have been better. Nope. On Wednesday I spent another 7 hours on her hair (4 hours of that was with the help of my sister-in-law who came over because when we spoke that day I sounded so distraught).  At the end of that comb out my sister-in-law chopped off about 3 inches of her hair. It was a much kinder haircut than other friends of mine had offered to give her. My brother even recommended shaving it all off.

On day two we found approximately 40 nits. By this time we had a system going. I don’t recommend it, but it’s what I decided would be the best course of action. Once we found a nit…we cut out the entire hair. The comb wasn’t pulling them out and if you could get it off with your nail then you couldn’t see where it went. God forbid I dropped a nit in my hair or somewhere it might accidentally attach (I’m not sure that was possible, but I didn’t want them anywhere in my house). I also picked up the tip of dropping the nits in vinegar once we got them off (I guess it kills them).

Why the nit-picking you might ask. Myth #5: The lice treatments will kill the problem. Not so. The lice treatments typically kill the live lice, but it does not kill the nits. If they are left on they will hatch and then you start the entire process all over again. The challenge with the nits is that they are close to the scalp and can be on the underside of the hair so you have to look carefully at each strand of hair. That surely offered me incentive to get into her hair and to be methodical about it.

Knocked Out!

Between the combing, laundry, sleep deprivation and the need to take care of my daughter I was becoming a mess. I can’t recall how many times I cried in those early days and I know that not one single meal was prepared by me. I remember the first time I cried was when I realized that I had to comb through her hair like that every day for 14 days!  I continued the process of combing out, laundering our sheets and towels daily, vacuuming the comb out area and trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy for the next 12 days.  There was no room for work, socializing, me time. We ate nothing but take out that first week.

On Sunday I had what I felt was an incredible set back. I was about to wake up my daughter up and decided to just peek at her hair while she was lying down. I saw a live louse (singular) but I couldn’t catch it. Then it was escaped into her hair. I tried to find it, but it eluded me. All I could think about was that she was scampering around in my daughter’s hair laying more glue stuck nits that I might never find and we’d be caught up in this awful cycle forever. It was just too much.

We had swimming lessons that day. I was five days in, had spent an average of 8 hours a day JUST on her hair and was incredibly sleep deprived (like back in the new-born days). I took her to her lessons pulled the manager aside explained the situation and bought her a swimming cap to prevent any transmission…then I promptly fell apart. I’m welling up just thinking about it. The manager (a teacher and mother) was so sweet. She’d been there before with other parents.

I’m a pretty strong woman who has been thorough my fair share of stuff, but these creatures brought me to my knees. Another mom saw me and asked if I was ok. When I broke down crying while trying to explain what was going on she called over her sister-in-law. She was also a mother who happened to be a hairdresser. She gave me a bunch of suggestions; commiserated with me on how terrible it was (both of her girls had it at the same time) and offered up a big old bowl of hope.  I still felt like dirt, but maybe…just maybe I’d pull through. That afternoon I was doing the comb out and found that little sucker that had eluded me earlier that day. My spirit lifted and I finally thought that I had turned the corner.

Things improved over the next week or so. I was able to get down to comb-outs lasting only 4-5 hours a day and finding 10-20 nits. It’s odd because there were no more live lice, but I was still finding nits that I didn’t see the day before. I’m still not sure if I was finding nits that were growing and thus were easier to see or ones that I might have missed due to eye fatigue. My goal had been to get to three days nit free. I felt like when I achieved that I could relax a little bit. Day 12 was my first nit free day, Day 13 I found 2 and on Day 14 we were nit free again. After that I checked every other day.

We are four weeks and two days from D-Day (discovery day). I kept notes on my calendar so I would know what day we were on and how many nits I’d found. I haven’t found any nits stuck to her hair since day 14, but I do admit to being nit fatigued.

If I could do it all over again, I would have just found the money ($175/head) to have it professionally treated. When I look at over 60 hours spent the first week just combing out my daughter’s hair, approximately another $50 on a different natural treatment (recommended by a friend) and hair care supplies it would have been cheaper and less stressful. At least I think it would have been.

My lessons learned – don’t panic, talk to and reassure your child, check with other moms because they’ve likely been through it, know your options before you treat, use preventative products containing tea tree oil before it happens to you and if it does happen know that you will get thorough it. It might suck, but it will end one way or another.

If I NEVER see another louse or nit in my life it will be too soon. Tomorrow we are going to visit a lice treatment center in the area for a head check and to learn about additional products that are said to kill any larva that might have hatched from any nits I could have missed.  I’ll let you know what we find out because I know that there is another parent out there who is discovering lice in their child’s hair and who might not know what to do. I won’t recommend any products yet, as we are still working through them.  I hope this post helps!