Scratching My Head About How to Use a Fine Tooth Comb

Decades ago when I had my first experience with head lice I carefully read the directions on the special shampoo. It basically said, "shampoo, wait, rinse, repeat, comb." 

"Well, duh, who wouldn't comb their hair after washing it?" I thought. This left me scratching my head, in a rhetorical sense, not like the kids were head scratching. I didn't get it. 

After I did figure out the whole head lice issue, I was camp nurse in a beautiful mountain setting for 100 sponsored kids of prisoners. I mention all those details because of the dynamics. This is when I had the opportunity to become an expert on the subject of lice. (I will get back to this.)

If you are not scratching your head by now, I found a link with loads of pictures of nothing but head lice. EW!

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=head+lice&qpvt=head+lice&FORM=IGRE#x0y1649

When using a recomended treatment, "shampoo, rinse and repeat" doesn't sound hard. It isn't difficult to do. What is challenging is getting those pesky critters off of the furniture, the stuffed animals, the bedding, the hats and coats,..and more. The goal is to wipe them out the first time or they keep perpetually procreating more lice! Yuck!

When you have children in school inevitably you will get the dreaded note of all notes at the most inconvenient time in your life. "There has been reported a case of head lice in your child's class room. Your child's head has been checked...Now, keep you gross kid home and deal with it!"

YIKEs!

After reading what really was a more professionally written notice many parents feel as if the school nurse just dropped them from a sky scrapper onto an emotional roller coaster with a lot of finger pointing and abig letter L hung around the poor kid's neck.

Meanwhile, back to the camp in the mountains for a two week outing.

I had set limits in writing and verbally to only 98 kids and councelors before they got on  two buses. I had heard rumors that some  kids had recently been affected with lice, colds and sore throats. I would not be having anyone with lice or strep throat getting on the buses. Everyone was to get a head and throat check before they could get on the bus. We were to be 2 hours away from medical care other than what supplies I carried in my Nancy Nurse Bag.

RULES

• Do not share  or pass hats around. Wear only your own clothes.
• Do not trade beds or bedding.
• Do not share hair brushes or curlers. ( We all still wore curlers in 1984)
• Keep your belonging in your own space.
• Everyone gets a head check before getting on the bus.
• Blah, blah, blah..

I remember two sisters laughing at my limit setting. "Head lice and poison ivy, he-he-he." These girls had the most beautiful thick dark hair that reached down to the backs of their knees. (Their hair had never been cut or trimed; ever.)

Both buses started to pull away. I was on the front bus. The second bus, with the sisters with real long hair, stopped to pick up the last two girls who were running after the bus.

The 2nd day into the two trip, those two late comers, who did not get their head checked, had major infestations of lice. I am not going to try to repeat much about the upset that some of the adult counselors raised. It was kind of like a linch mob storming my cabin when they found out. I hoped they couldn't find any tar  on site to go with their feather pillows.

To make my anecdote more complicated, I was told that many of the kids on the second bus had been running around from seat to seat stealing the boys baseball caps. Regretably, the councelors had failed to enforce the law I had laid down for good reasons,

I felt like one lone sheriff in town with  every cow poke who had come  in from the heards for a gun fight. That's not exactly true, but I felt it. I did find two councelors who actually knew how to pitch in and help me do what we had to do with 100 head of kids plus councelors with itchy heads.

So much for crafts and games all day. We ran in shifts looking at heads.

• After reading the first part of my story, the next time your child gets head lice, it won't seem like the world is coming to an end, comparitively.
• Repeat this phrase to your self, "Nits happen. I will take it in stride."

Here is the challenge I had at camp. We were two hours away from anything, but a general store. The county public health department sent up the only 10 bottles of treament they had on hand with only 10 crappy fine tooth combs to go around. 75% of the kids and councelors on the 2nd bus were found to have lice when checked the first time. This did not include the people on the first bus with me after a few days of sharing personal items.

.(Often times when parents check heads and they don't see any bugs they think they are in the clear. Trust me when I say no head lice looks as obvious as the plastic lady bug in my picture above.)

• Ask your local Pharmacist what is currently recomended for you area to use. What works will change as the bugs come reisitant to treatments.
• Buy the best metal fine tooth comb you can find. It will be a good investment. Boxes of shampoo or rince do come with plstic combs that aren't the best. If yu can get one with a magnifying glass, that is wonderful.
• Pull out every clean sheet you have in your linen closet to cover all of your furniture, especially anything you can't wash in the washer.
• Have the person suspected to have lice sit comfortably under good lighting. (It will take awhile.) Seperate the hair like a your hairdresser would to cut your hair. Check every body in your house for lice.
• If you see bugs in the hair you know for sure that there really are more than you can see. They crawl fast away from light. don't expect them to sit and wave at you. The bigger they are, the more mature they are. If you see them in a hair brush that is positve with out a doubt for lice too.
• Inspect the scalp, eye brows, back of neck and behind the ears for red or raised bumps. Lift strands of hair up gently pulling left, right, up and down. If you do see any red bumps that is a tale tell sign that the bugs are crawling around and biting whether you see any or not.
• Your child or you may complain of itching. Dry scalp and thinking about lice will make an itchy head too. Dandruf flakes off; nits do not. ( I will explain later.)
• I look for what I call "flee dirt". It looks like little flecks of dirt. Prepare yourself to gross out some more. Those dirty spots are lice poop!
• Be aware that not every treatment available will kill the eggs or nits, too. You will have to remove every sticken nit you can't find, one by one. This is known as "Nit Picking".

In my first paragraph, do you remember when I didn't get the hair combing part? You must use a very good fine tooth comb to comb every nit from the hair from top of the head to the bottom of the hair. Then, wipe the nits onto a damp paper towel then discard into a plastic bag. Do not comb like you would ususally comb your hair. Comb top to the bottom and wipe. Comb from the top to the end once and wipe. If you look you will see tiny white or browhish eggs tha you combed off. The longer the infestation the more nits you will have to remove. So don't put off an effective treatment and nit picking for a few days. Do it ASAP!

• Lice crawl around on the head.
• Nits are "glued" to hair shafts.

In order to remove the nits, one by one, think of them if they were bead on a string. I could not remove that long yellow up there with out removing a bunch on either side, unless I cut the string right by the yellow bead. They won't fall off when the string is tied in one piece.

In order for a bead to come off of the string in the picture above, each one would have to slide off of the string. (Assuming I untied it so it looked more like a hair.)

In the begining of my anecdote, I did not understand this principle. Many parents do not either. This lack of knowledge is what will keep the critters reinfesting over and again. Without the nits being prevented from hatching on a nice warm head the problem continues to be a problem. You might kill some of the bugs with the shampoo. But with nits timed to hatch, you've got bugs again.

• Comb down each small section of hair to the very end of the shafts. Wipe off any nits you see or don't see onto a damp paper towel which you will discard immediately in to a plastic bag. Removing the nits is much like pulling a bead off a of a string.( I know I just repeated myself. I did this on purpose to make the point that you will have to repeat this step over and over, again. Really!)
• If the hair is long or thick, you will have to use clips to seperate the hair into sections. Having three blonde children, I believe that fine blonde hair is the most difficult to work with. It is hard to see.
• Have the child sit in a covered chair. After working on the hair, wash the cover in hot water.  You will have to do this several or more times. don't lay the cover cloth on the other furniture.

Prevention and ridding the entire house of lice.

• Hair  falls off our heads every day. Those hairs the have nits lying around on the floor,bedding or furniture will hatch into a crawling bug.
• Do not sit on a fabric couch to do this proceedure. Do not sit on the uncovered couch if you don't think you have lice. Lice can live independant  of a living being. You may get lice, too.
• Strip all the bedding and wash all of it in hot water.
• Gather up all the child's stuffed animals and seal them in a plastic bag for two weeks, if you can not wash them.
• Vaccum everything you can vaccum. Even if you have room in the disposable bag, throw it out in a sealed plasic bag.
• Mop the floors. Wash the mop head if it is not disposable.
• Check and recheck everyone's head everyday for two weeks.
• Notify all of your close contacts that you have lice. Not doing this, I think is one of the biggest things that keeps lice passing back and forth. People are ashamed and embarrased that others will think less of them. Let's face it, getting rid of lice is never fun and it takes a lot of schedual rearranging.
•  Lice know no socio-economic status. Lice do not care if a person is clean or dirty. NITS HAPPEN. When a louse finds a host to feed on they lay their eggs to make more lice.

Head lice will infest much more than the head. You are going to have clean. I am not talking about polishing the furniture, kind of clean.

• All brushes and combs in the house will have to be boiled in water or the dishwasher.
• All bedding; blankets, pillow, sheets will have to be washed in hot water. You may want to temporaily turn up the water heater to 140 degrees.
• Vacuum everything, then cover it with a clean sheet. (Wash and replace the sheet as needed.)The vacuum cleaner bag must be placed inside a plastic bag and immediately carried to trash can outside.
• Anything that can not be washed in hot water or dried in the dryer must be bagged in a plastic bag and sealed for at least two weeks. (Remember the stray hairs?)
• I am sorry to tell you this, but will need to keep after this for several weeks. You will be rechecking everyone's heads again in 2,3,4 and even 6  weeks until heads stay free of lice. Even though you did a good job, your child's class mates may still be infested. Kids heads may touch on the merry go round. Or, jackets may be hanging next to each other with lice on them.
• I have found that vinegar rinse after shampooing seems to help soften  the nits. Keeping girls hair in a tight braid close to the head helps also. When working on nit picking you may want to cover your own head with a scarf.

(Try doing all this in cabins nestled in the mountains with out houses for 100 active kids.)

Here's my punch line about the sisters with long hair that had never been cut. It was nearly impossible, certainly time consuming, to pull every nit down the length of their hair, in order to remove them before they hatched. We needed to cut the hair shorter. (Some councelors wanted to just shave everybodies heads. What a night mare!) Both mother and father of the sisters were in seperate prisons. We were not legally allowed to chop anyone's hair with out parental consent. We had to locate the wardens to get permission from each parents, directly via pay phone to convince them both to give us verbal permission to cut only 12 inches off the long locks.

As I remember because of the failure of the councelors to enforce and the refusal to abide by my "stupid" rules, most of the kids had lice. Lice are no respectors of persons.

What I hate the most about head lice in my own house is at we are reluctant to  hug each other. Thinking about this subject, I Made sure to hug the grand girls before Isent them to bed.

 I think tomorrow would be a good time to head check, just in case.

What do you think?

Thanks for putting up with another  of my anedotes. I do love to tell a story to make a point. This one was rather long. I hope it helped to make head lice a tad more interesting.

This is Malika Bourne the No Non-cents Nanna saying, "Make good choices."