The Parasitic Karma Mobile
You'll need a bit of background for this story, and then a bit more, so bear with me a tic.

I have a few phobias. Mostly, they don't interfere with my life, unlike people who spend their existence cowering from spiders nonchalantly weaving webs and digesting flies. I fear geese (they're bloody evil, and they chase you) and wasps (they're bloody evil, and they chase you), and I fear parasites.

My sister once bought home hair lice from Brownie camp, and I wore a swimming hat and screamed at her if she came near me. I even adapted a stick to become the Sister Prodding Stick if she came too close.

Skip forward many years to when I was at university, in an appalling house with appalling people. One morning, I was up early, doing my coursework, and I casually scratched my scalp, as you do, and came back with a fingernail bulging with life.

I had lice.

If you want to understand just how upset I was, try to picture a grown woman, in her pyjamas, crying and trying to run away from her own head.

After I calmed down enough to form sentences, I practically ran to the pharmacists, and demanded poisons. NOW. The pharmacist asked me a few questions, which I answered in a frenzy. One of them was "do you have asthma?". When I answered yes, she sighed and shook her head. "I'm afraid I can't sell you the ten minute lotion then. You'll have to use the 12 hour one." I tried to convince her that I'd made a mistake, and I didn't have asthma at all (to hell with breathing when your head is holding a population equal to Chinas), but she was having none of it.

And so followed the longest twelve hours of my life, coated in poison, wearing a plastic tesco bag with it's handles over my ears to catch the cascade of dying parasites. I bought enough to treat all my housemates too, as I was mortified at bringing such a plague into our home.

Or I was, until my housemate's boyfriend muttered the famous line "Oh, well you can't have caught them off Carol, because she had them last week."

Such stunning logic floored me, and then enraged me as I realised she'd been infested and neglected to tell any of us.

I waited for her in the lounge, drenched in poison, wearing a tesco bag over my ears, full of a deep and terrible rage.

She came home, and I launched into an epic rant. She apologised, and I relented. Slightly. However, my final words were these:

"I can just about cope with you giving me hair lice. Just. But if you ever bring home scabies, I will fucking kill you where you stand. Do you understand me? I WILL KILL YOU WHERE YOU STAND."

Skip forward a week. A traumatic week of finding the bath coated with dead lice, burning my hairbrushes, and constantly searching my head to prove the plague had gone. I come home, and Carol is waiting for me in the hallway.

"Smell my skin." She says. It's not the most enticing offer, and I declined.

"Smell it." She insisted. I sighed, and gave her a tentative sniff. She smelt exceptionally toxic.

"I went to the doctors. I've got scabies. They've given me a lotion for us all to use."

For those of you that have never had scabies, the treatment for getting rid of colonies of repulsive creatures burrowing, shitting, screwing and making babies under your skin is to paint yourself from earlobes to ankles in toxic lotion, and then wait for 24 hours. There is no indignity quite like having to get someone to paint your arse with poison while you cry.

It was the worst twenty hour hours I've ever endured. I wept, I retched, I threw away all my bedding, and I had to tell my boyfriend that there was a very good chance tiny creatures were pooing in his skin.

So where's the karma?

Skip forward another week, and Carol has been back to the doctors for the results of her skin swab. The kicker?

She didn't have scabies at all. The stress of me threatening to "FUCKING KILL HER WHERE SHE STANDS" had bought her out in a psychosomatic rash, which had been diagnosed as scabies.

Oh how we laughed :(

There you go. Parasitic karma in action.
(Smaldini www.fuggler.com, Fri 22 Feb 2008, 12:29, 6 replies)

From this I have learnt...
1: Don't piss you off.
2: Reading about headlice has made me itch.
( The magic of chutney Shakes it like an Instagram filter!, Fri 22 Feb 2008, 12:36, closed)

B-itch
"Smell my skin"..is that like the old chestnut "Pull my finger" !

Sounds like you were housed up in a gypsy caravan park..
(TheRiddler Hmmmmm... I concur., Fri 22 Feb 2008, 12:48, closed)

Scabies...
Evil evil evil evil evil little bastards.

Luckily my parents were out the day i got the Lyclear, so I could walk round in the buff without too much of an issue. It was highly entertaining when i went to pick up my phone, and due to slippy hands, chucked it across the room!
( Agnostic Antichrist Baltimora, Fri 22 Feb 2008, 13:00, closed)

I got scabies once.
I got the Kwell lotion, enough for myself, my roommate and my girlfriend, and started blasting away at the little fuckers immediately.

It turns out that you have to wash your bedding and clothes to get rid of them, and anything that can't be washed needs to hang in a closet for 48 hours- they don't survive away from humans for very long.

Turns out I picked them up by sitting on a couch with a friend of my girlfriend, who happened to work in a nursing home where there had been an outbreak. I found this out after the fact, of course... but after that she was known as Crabby Cathy.

Yeeccchh.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Fri 22 Feb 2008, 15:08, closed)

Scabies
I remember in my student days attending a Parasitology lecture (top tip for the squeams, if he says, 'here's a slide of a really interesting case' CLOSE YOUR EYES) when the elderly rather dignified academic got onto the subject of scabies.

"As it happens, I caught scabies from a prostitute at Kings Cross station..." Cue shock 'orror gasps from suddenly itchy audience..."by shaking her hand". Phew.

It wasn't until later that we had a collective "hang on a second......"
(osok Rebel without a clue, Fri 22 Feb 2008, 16:19, closed)

Yay!
I had scabies as a kid. Unfortunatly at the time, this would be in the early 70's the treatment was to be covered in this ointment and scrubbed with a floorbrush. Me and my two sisters had to stand there nekkid covered in this white cream while we waited our turn to be scrubbed. It hurt like fuck and we were all in tears, including my mum.

I can remember it like it was yesterday.
( girlinthehole, Fri 22 Feb 2008, 19:06, closed)