Lousy (Not That Kind)

Once upon a time as a young teenager I stopped eating cookie dough. Nowadays it seems like a strange blip on my cookie-making history, but my cookie dough fast lasted for several years. It began partly because I learned about salmonella, but mostly because I failed to stop eating cookie dough immediately upon learning about salmonella. My mom would make cookies, and I'd walk through the kitchen past the cookie dough bowl, and I'd think, I have been eating cookie dough all my life and have never gotten sick from it, and my dad has been eating cookie dough all his life, which is much longer than mine, and he has never gotten sick from it, and the chances of getting salmonella are, like, one in something-million, and cookie dough is really, really good, and I'm probably not going to get sick, and so I'd eat some.

But then almost as soon as I'd eaten it, I'd start worrying. I could almost feel the salmonella sliding like raw eggs through my stomach and into my intestines, and then multiplying inside of me. I would worry so much that I'd begin to feel sick to my stomach, and since being sick to one's stomach is a clear symptom of salmonella poisoning, I would almost go crazy anticipating the horrible food poisoning that never came.

It only took having my worries multiply like an active culture of salmonella a few times to convince myself that a one-in-a-something-million risk wasn't worth even a bite of cookie dough.

What got me back on cookie dough several years later was learning that it takes 72 hours for salmonella symptoms to appear. My cookie dough salmonella symptoms were, of course, all psychological, and my imagination couldn't keep track of three days very well. By the time the symptoms ought to have started appearing, I very likely wasn't thinking about the symptoms anymore. The 72 hours released me from my worries. I'm grateful for that 72-hour buffer, because cookie dough is the best part of making cookies. It's been years since I've given much thought to salmonella via cookie dough, and I'm much happier for it.

Now that I look back, my paranoia about salmonella seems a little bit crazy-obsessive. Worrying did me no good, wouldn't have done me any good even if I had come down with salmonella poisoning, and in fact generally made life a lot more miserable for an entire evening. But I've been thinking about my salmonella fears this week, because last Saturday I learned that my upstairs neighbor's 12-year-old neice brought a case of head lice with her to girls camp, and ever since then I have felt the same slightly-rational-but-mostly-irrational anxiety creeping into my life.

In reality, I am at low risk. I slept in a different cabin, shared no hats or sweatshirts or coats or pillows or blankets or brushes with any of the girls, and have no memory of any head-to-head contact with my neighbor's niece (and head-to-head contact is how one contracts lice). I wore my hair in a ponytail all week, and most of the time had on a hat or a bandanna as well. A week and a half after learning about the lice, none of the other girls or leaders have found anything suspicious in their hair, and my upstairs neighbor has been taking extensive measures to eradicate the infestation from her home, vacuuming multiple times a day, bagging all clothing and linens, and using the washer and dryer almost 24/7 to ensure that everything gets a run through hot water.

But I had lice when I was about 10 years old, and having lice as a child scars you a little bit. All week my scalp has been itching. At first it was just a general itchiness. Then I learned that lice congregate near the ears and base of the neck and my itchiness moved to that general vicinity. Then I learned that lice are more active in the dark and I started feeling itchier at night. I'm sorry if I'm making your scalp itch as you read. Since you can't contract lice via internet, especially from someone who only has a psychological case, you are probably pretty safe.

Two nights ago I started having lice dreams. I dreamed about finding lice in my hair, and I dreamed about going to the doctor to get checked out for lice (for some reason I had to board a plane and fly to London for this), and I dreamed about Jin coming down with some strange, itchy, lice-like disease that caused him to chew his paw to the point of bleeding and made him literally crazy, and I woke up tired and seriously contemplating the repercussions of shaving my head. Later that day I went to Smith's and shelled out $20 for a lice treatment to kill the lice that I was 98% sure were not actually living in my hair.

Last night I had no lice dreams. Today my scalp has not really itched at all (I mean, except for right now while I've been writing this post, but I expected that). Maaaaybe I killed a few lice with chemicals last night. But I think the Nix treatment was more like my 72-hour salmonella buffer zone protecting me from the fear of something more than from the feared thing itself.

Tonight I think I will celebrate by making cookies and eating some of the cookie dough.