I'm not sure I'm posting this in the right forum - I'm not sure quite where this should go. But if anyone might understand it, it would be other parents...so here goes....

I have bipolar disorder and have a history of hallucinations, including tactile ones. I had a bout of them over the summer and have been okay for a while. But now I'm afraid they may be coming back soon.

I got the call from the school nurse that every parent dreads: my daughter has head lice. My girls are 10 and 13 and I've never had to deal with this before. When I got to the school and the nurse told me, I was in tears. I got the medicated shampoo and took my daughter home. She washed her hair and used the medicated shampoo, and I just became paralyzed. I couldn't touch her to get the nits out of her hair. I had to call my husband home from work. (He works an hour away and had just gotten into work for the evening.) I couldn't touch anything that might have come into contact with her head. Somehow I've managed to wash bedding and clothing and such, but not without copious amounts of handwashing afterwards. This was last Monday when all this began.

Well, almost a week has gone by and now the nits that weren't killed by the shampoo and weren't discovered soon enough (she has long, thick hair) have hatched and my husband found them this weekend. Once again, I am paralyzed and really freaking out about this. I've done so much laundry over the last few days that our well has run dry and even after washing things in hot water and putting them in the dryer for an hour and a half, I still can't touch anything with even one stray hair on it.

Now, I do not have OCD. Before I had to stop working because of the bipolar, I was a clinical microbiologist and handled bacteria and fungi all the time. These little bugs are paralyzing me. I feel awful that I can't hug my daughter. She's handling it very well and my husband has been a trooper, checking her hair every day, and twice a day this weekend. The school nurse is also helping. I just can't do it.

I'm starting to feel the little twitches on my head every now and then. The nurse checked me and my husband has checked me twice and I don't have any - none of the rest of the family does thankfully - but every little twinge is making me batty.

I see my pdoc for my regular appointment on Tuesday, so if I do start to really hallucinate, we'll be on top of it. But in the meantime, I'm slowly losing what's left of my mind.

I guess I just needed to vent. Thanks for listening.