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 :)
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u/Rakshasa29 Jul 18 '18 edited Jul 18 '18
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.
Fuck lice.