nit-picking

Literally.

The whole nightmarish scenario begins with the kid scratching her head over and over, compulsively, like a dog with fleas.

Actually, for all I know, a human with lice is exactly like a dog with fleas.

What's itching is a teeny-tiny crawly louse biting into the scalp. I could do some quick research to see if that's accurate, but if you really care you can do it yourself. For all intents and purposes, this is close enough. By the time you realize your kid is scratching way too often, she's infested. No, not a pretty word, I grant you.

You know she's infested big time when you peer closely at the hair near the hairline around her ears and nape and you see lots of teeny-tiny white bubbles that look like hair follicles attached securely to lots of the hairs. Too many to count.

Those are the nits -- the lice eggs -- and they're stuck like glue until they hatch. You need to pick them out -- yes YOU, because you're the mother -- one by one, and destroy them before they become mature blood-sucking parasites. But first you must kill THEIR mothers.

It's a rotten job, so rotten that one cruel mother in an Israeli movie I saw actually shaved her daughter's head rather than going through the aggravation. Very traumatic.

So you go to the drugstore and stand in line to speak to a pharmacist because clearly lice-killer lotion is far too dangerous and complicated to be available on open shelves. Likewise the special comb for removal of dead lice.

WHY must we stand in the pharmacy line with all the flu-sufferers and antibiotic-buyers for LICE SHAMPOO AND COMBS?
[My own personal current rant on power-tripping "pharmaceutical" practices.]

So then you go home and pour the vile, noxious fluid over your baby's head, trying not to splash it in her eyes and blind her. ["Omigod! Splash your eyes! Splash your eyes! It's dripping down!"] Then you put her long hair up in a clip and make her wait with the windows open for 10 minutes because the smell feels so poisonous. You then send her to the shower to do a big shampoo, and when she comes out, she must sit in front of you with wet hair, while you comb, comb, comb out the lice corpses (you don't really see them, but it's a gross thought) with the teeny-tiny dense-toothed comb.

And then the nit-picking begins. The comb is supposed to comb out eggs, but it doesn't. You have to go through small section by small section peering very closely at the hair, and the older your eyes are the tougher this job gets. I need to put my face right next to her scalp to see the tiny nits. You have to locate each and every one, get ahold of it with two fingers, and pull it along the hair until it comes off; you can't just pick it straight off, because it's actually hugging the hair shaft. It requires a good light, and a kid with more patience than mine, but she sits in front of the tv, and suffers less than I do.

After an hour of this activity, my back is aching from the weird angle and we're both in a pretty foul mood. But for a few days she stops scratching! Don't forget to change all the bed sheets and wash them in very hot water.

Then you do it again 10 days later, to catch the ones you missed that have now hatched.

Head-shaving starts to look like a very good idea.