the more traditional anal route.
I later spoke to Kim Søholt Larsen, an entomologist from Denmark with a PhD in fleas and a specialization in lice and ticks, about this behavior. “If they urinated, your hair would stick together and you would immediately figure out that you have lice,” said Larsen. “This is how they hide themselves.”
They’ve had a lot of time to hone their terror techniques, because they’ve been hunting our plasma for millennia. The only good thing I found out about head lice was that they aren’t body lice: Body lice carry disease.
In the meantime, I still had Dave check me at the slightest provocation. If I felt anything, I’d turn on the bright overhead lights, flip my head over, and have him gander at my scalp. We were searching for insects that looked like black sesame seeds; irritated red skin near the ears and neck; and tiny white dots—lice eggs or nits—that informational lice blogs described as looking like “dandruff that won’t move” near the base of my hair.
I did not moan from pleasure during these encounters. It wasn’t that Dave was bad at lice checking, but I found that the practice didn’t feel as hedonistic when it wasn’t recreational—nothing like a real fire to take all the fun out of a fire drill. Dave would toss a couple of strands here and there and tell me that everything was going to be okay.
“There’s a very low possibility that you got it,” he said, over and over again. “The kids were here for like two minutes.”
During that time, I got so invested in looking for lice that I forgot about my usual terror of tumors. In some ways, it was kind of nice to mix up my concerns. Tumor hunting gets very one-note after a while.
Life continued. If I felt an itch, I made Dave look. Otherwise, I was content just to have a valid reason never to let anyone ever sit in my aqua-colored velvet sofa chair again.
By the time ten days rolled around—which was the amount of time it would have taken any new eggs to hatch—I’d probably had Dave check my hair about fourteen times and we hadn’t found one louse. Finally, I felt confident that we had eluded the little bastards and that we were in the clear. It was perfect timing, too, because we had only two days to prepare to take off for our honeymoon.
Dave had had a hard time getting time off work, so we had waited two and a half years after our wedding to take the Japan honeymoon of our dreams. I had spent three months planning the affair. Over eleven days, we would be visiting four bustling cities. We began busying ourselves with packing and plans of what we’d eat.
We arrived giddy and exhausted at Narita airport. Over the next few days, the stresses of the last couple of weeks completely disappeared. I even eased up on the idea of an elective hysterectomy. We became fully engrossed in our new surroundings. We went early in the morning to Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, and we visited Shinto shrines and Zen rock gardens.
After a few days, we took a train to Hakone, a small mountain town renowned for its hot springs. We stayed in a ryokan, which is a traditional Japanese inn. Our room was beautiful and highly flammable. The whole thing was made of wood and bamboo tatami mats. In fact, tatami mats are how they measure the size of rooms in Japan. They don’t say a room is twenty by thirty-five feet; they will say something like “It’s seven tatamis.” (In the United States, we don’t have a form of measurement that’s nearly as charming. If we tried, it would turn into something awful like “My house is three cement trucks and a granite countertop that caused four people to lose their fingers in a Brazilian quarry.”)
A soaking tub was on our balcony. Dense green foliage gave us privacy. We wore robes at all times of the day, because they even brought us our dinner.
Soon we were taking bullet trains, regular trains, and a ferry to find our way to Naoshima, a small island with a phenomenal hotel inside a modern art gallery. In the morning, the seventh of our trip, I went for a walk by myself to admire the magnificent sculptures on the grounds, such as the massive polka-dotted pumpkin by the artist Yayoi Kusama. I continued walking along the shore, ankle-deep in water. I looked out over the serene and vast horizon and felt so much gratitude.
I then noticed that I was scratching the back of my head. How long had that been happening?
After taking a shower, I roused Dave and we went to breakfast. “I think I’m having a reaction to the shampoo,” I told him over eggs and miso soup. I figured that using all the different shampoos at the different hotels was making my scalp feel irritated.
“Yeah, probably,” he said. He also mentioned that it was unusually humid for us so it’s possible that I was having a heat rash.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “The climate really is different here.”
He told me that the psoriasis on his scalp was acting up, too.
“That makes sense,” I said. He always had more trouble with his psoriasis when we traveled.
Later that afternoon, we made our way via bullet train to Kyoto, where we would spend our final three days. After that, we would have one night in Tokyo before heading back to New York.
When we reached Kyoto, we were exhausted, so we grabbed a quick dinner at a tonkatsu place before going straight to bed. When we woke the next morning, we both had a cough and runny nose. Nonetheless, we explored Ninomaru Palace and Kinkaku-ji temple and attended a kimono fashion show.
By that point, Dave and I were both having coughing fits, but my back also itched painfully. It was an odd symptom for a cold. I got onto the internet and typed in, “Why does my back itch …” And then the search engine autocompleted “… when I cough?”
That was comforting. I obviously wasn’t the only one. The explanation I found said that when we cough, the nerve fibers in the diaphragm can become irritated by overstimulation. Because there aren’t a lot of nerves in our organs, the brain gets confused—there is a crossed signal of sorts—and makes you feel like your back is itchy when it’s actually not.
The takeaway: My itchiness was clearly an illusion.
That evening, we were so bad off that we went to a pharmacy. The two-story shop was floor-to-ceiling packed with fluorescent boxes. No one spoke English and none of the medicines had English translations. They weren’t even in Roman letters. If they were in Spanish or Italian, I could have at least tried to pronounce the words and then pretended that I knew what they meant. But with Japanese symbols, I was so hopeless that I might as well have been trying to read a pile of pick-up sticks.
After a half hour, we gave up and bought two mystery boxes of drugs. For all we knew, they could have been to treat a dog’s case of heartworm and to give me an erection for twelve months. We brought the medicine back to our hotel, knocked back a couple of gel caps, and sat watching the news in Japanese. An hour later, I was still scratching. During a commercial that depicted a woman having an intense flirtation with what looked like a fried chicken cutlet, I looked over at Dave.
I stared at him until he said, “What?”
“Do you think it’s possible that the itching is from lice?” I said.
“I doubt it,” he said.
It did seem unlikely. It had been almost a whole month since we’d seen his niece and nephew. If I’d had lice, wouldn’t they have made themselves known weeks earlier?
I asked if he’d check just to be sure. The light wasn’t great in the room, so I sidled up to the bedside table
