I’m no longer ashamed to say it.
I got lice at 27.
Ok maybe I am a little bit… but what irritates me the most about this story is it’s not even the fun sex crabs (pubic lice) that would’ve resulted in at least getting laid.
No, I get regular hair lice.
The primary school lice.
The lice you get when you’re usually, like, 8-years old-and-your-mum-has-to-comb-through-your-hair-type of lice.
There I was, in the middle of Mexico volunteering at a hostel, doin’ laundry and makin’ beds. I was there for about a month and things I remember from that experience are mainly doing were doin’ laundry and makin’ beds (and struggling at Spanish) oh, and eavesdropping on conversations from hungover Australians about how cheap the cocaine was (as opposed to the $300 we pay for basically baking powder in Aus), yes it was a regular enough topic of conversation that I feel the need to bring it up now, oh yes, and the stupid lice, which I guess is why you’re here.
So at this point I’d been there for 3 weeks already volunteering, I’d met some cool people, secured my spot in the volunteer dorms and had set up a nice little nook in, but more importantly, had my nice little phone charger spot, because as the saying goes ‘wherever I lay my phone charger, that’s my home.’ or whatever.
So it was probably like a Tuesday afternoon and there I was, hanging out with a friend I’d met trying to play it cool, which was my first mistake, because my head started itching. Sure, heads itch, it’s normal! probably the $2 miscellaneous Mexican shampoo I tried to skimp on. Or just me existing in a sweat heap, or maybe it was the Mexico water finally getting to me! Ehh, it’s fine!
Then comes the next day:
Head itching. Worse than yesterday. I’m really trying to hide it but I’m feeling more and more like that kid from Snoopy with the chaotic stink lines, it’s gone beyond ‘haha my head is itchy!’
Then I scratch my head and I feel something… something crawls over my finger.
and even still, past Lena thought it was fine, that it was a one off occurrence.
To be fair the last time I had lice was when I was genuinely 10 years old, so, strangely I didn’t immediately remember Louse Removal 101 off the top of my head (pun intended).
So what did I do? I left it for a few days… (I know, I know, look, there wasn’t much reasoning behind it other than straight up denial.)
So, obviously, it got worse.
So there I am laying on the hammock of blissful ignorance. Until I scratched my head and pulled OUT A LICE. (AHHFHGHJ I’m retching as I type this)
That’s it. I was putting my foot down.
THIS HAS GONE FAR ENOUGH. The lice had claimed my head as their new home and had gone from cavemen civilisation to a little bustling metropolis with roundabouts and everything, soon enough they’d invent social media and we’d all be screwed. I had to put a stop to this, if not for me, for the mental health and wellbeing of the lice.
So in a dramatic rage I tore off my bedsheets and thought about lighting a match, but, maybe just washing them would suffice (dammit) I hurled everything into that washing machine I’d grown to know and love, socks, clothes, anything my head or body had touched in the past week.
I then marched down to La Pharmacia in the last of my clothes (the ones I hadn’t worn in a month – at least 2 sizes too small (but now is not the time to blame beer and tacos for my mistakes). I marched to the counter and stood there, the pharmacist staring at me, then and realised I had no clue what ‘lice’ was in Spanish.
Excellent.
So I just stood there fuming, in silence, which, now I look back, must have looked so weird. The pharmacist making eye contact with me, had greeted me in Spanish but my English brain enraged with English swearwords and the word ‘lice’ over and over again, had no Spanish words to communicate my anger.
I pointed to my head and hair, then resorted to making scratching gestures like I was a feral monkey, which wasn’t far off and just kept pointing to my head saying ‘el lice’
and look, I’m not saying they knew what I was talking about but if I were them, I too would wait a little while longer to watch this basic white bitch struggle before giving them a solution.
This was until I remembered I had the glory magical 21st century tool of Google translate.
I still remember to this day, piojos. If I learned any Spanish in my month-long trip it was ‘tienes el bano?’ (do you have a bathroom?) and ‘piojos’ pinche piojos. (fucking lice.)
It wasn’t until I was saying piojos over and over again that I looked around and saw at least 10 other people in the pharmacy looking at me. Oh, good.
The pharmacist finally said ‘ahhh, si.’ and gave me a questionable white and green bottle that had piojos written on it, I thought that was probably a good sign, I slapped my money down on the counter, awkwardly said gracias, ran out of there and pretended that the past 5 minutes had never happened.
And now the fun part, to actually get rid of these pinche piojos.
So I did what anyone with lice does, goes to the shared hostel bathroom of 30 other travellers, cracks open the lice treatment box and proceeds to type the entire directions of the bottle into Google translate.
1. Wash hair, 2. Leave on head for 15 minutes. 3. Question your life up and wonder how you got here.
But before that I thought it would be absolutely hilarious (and it still is) to pose with my lice treatment bottle like an influencer who’d just got a brand sponsorship. Now that’s a world I want to live in.
You know what though, there really is nothing like sitting in a shared bathroom (with people filtering in and out to use the toilets) for 15+ minutes with the lingering, and, somewhat nostalgic smell of lice treatment sitting on your head to really help you reevaluate some things. And just to make sure I never had to go through this again, I did it twice.
and it wasn’t until I was sitting down on that toilet seat in my compact light blue Kathmandu traveller’s towel 10 minutes later that I felt real relief. No itching. Finally. I’d wiped out the entire lice civilisation, just like that.
But to make matters worse, I had to break the awful news to my 2 new friends I’d met at the hostel who had a van, (to which I’d been rubbing my gross-ass contaminated head over this whole time) So just like I was 8 again and telling my mum I’d done something wrong I went to my friend and told her … “I think I have lice…” she just looked at me and blinked.
“What do you mean you have lice? Like crabs?”
No, not like crabs.
“How the fuck did you get lice?”
I don’t know.
“Oh my god. Do I have lice??”
… umm, look, probably.
So to be safe, I repeated the process to help my friends do lice treatment.. Like the good Samaritan and resilient lice survivor that I am. We marched to the chemist once again, but this time I felt like some really tacky, terrible spiritual guide, who actually entirely screwed them over and was now making them pay for it.
But we did it, we made it out lice free.
To this day (2 years later) I’m still unsure as to how this happened since I was the only one sleeping in that bed, and as a volunteer who’s entire existence became laundry, I was well-versed in the laundry world, I would consider myself queen of laundry, so my sheets were clean as a whistle, and clearly, as you can tell, I wasn’t having sex, so how the heck did this happen?
Anyway, since that story I am fortunate enough to say I have been at least 658 days lice free, I am a survivor. This is my story.
