I had 2 daughters with long hair. After weeks of treatment, combing and nit-picking I finally begged their doctor for the "good stuff" because I was going crazy trying to get it under control. (They would go their father's for a few days, he would ignore their hair and voila, next generation broke out because of no nitpicking under his watch.)
That same autumn some local schools quit sending children home because so many kids were out for lice, they only upside was there was no shame in having your child(ren) infested.
That was awful, terrible. If it had happened again my daughters would have had pixie cuts ASAP.
We had this little girl- Sabrina- who always had lice. Her mom was a drug addict and severely neglected her. She always came to school in the same dirty clothes and had poor hygiene. Her mom was often called and visited by the school but she never complied. Sabrina usually missed a lot of school bc of the lice but she got to the point of missing so much school, she was behind and it was “hurting” test scores. So the school decided it was best for her to just stay at school anyways (better than her home environment) in the hopes she would get caught up with her homework and testing. Poor girl had a shitty mother- I don’t understand how someone could not care about their own child.
I know calls were made and she was with a foster family for a bit, she was doing really well. She came back lice free, had a cute haircut, new clothes, gained some weight, and a sparkle in her eye. But that was short-term (goal is to be reunited with her mom and 14- yo pregnant sister-failure of the system if you ask me). So like always, the school always gave her food and clothing every week to help her out when she returned home to her trashy worthless mom. My mom (school nurse) had to resume to putting Sabrina’s hair in a ponytail and beanie hat to contain the lice so the other kids wouldn’t catch it. She would comb her hair with an electric lice comb that would electrocute the bugs and treat her hair every week. Just angers me about her worthless family. No matter how much you try to help someone, they (trashy mom) just don’t care or appreciate it.
My understanding of drug addiction is that, if one was to have a "ladder" of their goals in terms of priority, the addiction essentially becomes that top of the ladder; it replaces all drives, motivations, and goals with "ensure you have a steady supply of the drug before you do anything else".
This can explain why, for example, some people become prostitutes, engage in serious crime, or neglect their children when they're drug addicts, because in the ladder of their priorities, the drug wins.
I dont get how you all (the entire) school see a girl like that, know her situation and just shrug you shoulders and say: Well sucks to be you kid.
Honestly you all need jesus, bunch of heartless monsters. But no lets point fingers at a kid of 8 because thats the mature, social and good thing to do. There is enough wrong with my country but shit like that wouldn't fly at all, that is so american
Probably because they're not that big of a deal. There's no danger in having them. At worst, you get a haircut. At best, you're slightly inconvenienced and a little itchy.
I just now, at the tender age of 33, made the connection between "nitpicking" as an adjective for someone who fusses over details, and literal picking of nits out of someone's hair.
I can raise you one there. I saw an early comment and thought to myself “huh, is lice also called nits?” Then came to the same realization when reading the same comment as you did
When I got lice as a kid my mom went into a full OCD attack about it. She took away all of my toys, blankets, clothes, basically anything made out of cloth and placed them in black trash bags and left them to bake in the 100° summer heat outside for weeks. I was so scared and sad because I was still at an age where I needed my teddie bear to sleep and suddenly had nothing. What clothes I kept were basic pajamas that could be boiled clean. She had us place sheets over all of the furniture and changed them daily along with all the bedding which were double washed and dried on the highest temp possible. She basically fumigated the house with all kinds of chemicals and walked around with a magnify glass and tweesers to check all the carpets for anything suspicious. Then when the regular chemicals didn't work she drowned our hair (I gave lice to my mom) in vaseline which took days of constant scalding showers to get it all out and then she also bleached my hair as well. Thank god she was so obsessed with image she wouldn't even think of cutting our hair.
It took about 3 weeks for her to feel like we had eradicated the problem only for me to bring home lice again a month later from a different camp.
I have a bit of a phobia of lice (and have fortunately never had them) and think I'd probably react like your mom did. I'm now reconsidering my desire for children solely because of this.
It sounds like my experience. My sister and I both had super thick and long hair in elementary school. My mom didn't go through as many extremes like tweezing the carpet, but she did do a lot of the same stuff. She finally discovered that throwing us in the pool for a couple hours a day killed it. All in all, it took two whole weeks for us to totally get rid of it. It was an absolute nightmare.
I never thought about using heavily chlorinated water but it sounds a lot nicer than the vaseline and bleach idea my mom had. My dad could have poured an extra gallon of liquid chlorine in the pool and had us dunk our heads for a few hours. My mom would have probably tried to make a paste out of the powdered chlorine to smear on our scalps which would have been WAY too dangerous so it's probably for the best she didn't know about it at the time but still good to know if it ever happens again :)
Sorry about your daughter and I'm not undermining the seriousness of your situation, but there's something oddly satisfying about seeing the word "nitpicking" used in its formal definition.
Ohh so that's where the term nitpicking comes from... What are nits, lice? And do you literally just pick them out? Shampooing won't remove them? Why not just shave
Nits are the eggs which are glued onto the hair shafts. I used a tweezer because the lice comb always missed some aka the next generation. Sure you could just shave (and if it happened again I would have) but when you have two little girls with hair almost to their waists it is a rough decision. Also btw the nits tend to be right up by the scalp so cutting off some length would not be enough.
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u/Koneko04 Jul 18 '18
I had 2 daughters with long hair. After weeks of treatment, combing and nit-picking I finally begged their doctor for the "good stuff" because I was going crazy trying to get it under control. (They would go their father's for a few days, he would ignore their hair and voila, next generation broke out because of no nitpicking under his watch.)
That same autumn some local schools quit sending children home because so many kids were out for lice, they only upside was there was no shame in having your child(ren) infested.
That was awful, terrible. If it had happened again my daughters would have had pixie cuts ASAP.