"While my family has been lucky to so far avoid nits, we weren’t so lucky with warts."

Are nits evolving? Are they becoming resilient to treatment? WTF is the deal with NITS?! How have we not eradicated them by now?

I can’t even. The little buggers have been breeding on the heads in my son’s classroom all term.

From non-toxic to a fully chemical-laden solution, the options out there seem to have all bases covered. So why are there still a gazillion nits? Every morning I spray my son’s hair with a little home-made concoction of tea-tree, eucalyptus and lavender essential oils praying the filthy, creepy little critters stay true to their promise of hating the oils so much they don’t come anywhere near him.

I’ve been using the same recipe since he was in preschool and five years later we’re still in the lead with no nits coming home. So far. Though I am scratching my head as I type. What is it about nits that make you itchy at the very thought? Right up there with chicken pox. Scratch scratch scratch.

While we’ve been lucky to so far avoid nits, we weren’t so lucky with warts.

In preschool my son got his first wart on the back of his hand. With a number of anaphylactic allergies, his immune system is somewhat compromised, so doesn’t fight viruses like healthy kids. Every single wart treatment from the chemist just seemed to encourage more warts to grow.

Then the unimaginable happened, despite being fully immunised, my son contracted whooping cough.

While some kids are fine with a dose of antibiotics and little more than an annoying cough, children with a compromised immune system and severe asthma like my son, are not so lucky.

When the pesky little cough continued for an hour after I’d given him his asthma puffers, I took him straight to hospital. Even though the cough was little more than a light, persistent tickle, with whooping cough quickly spreading through his preschool class, I wasn’t taking any chances. We spent hours isolated in hospital waiting for the doctors to decide whether or not to admit him as he didn’t have the ‘bark’ associated with whooping cough, but with a history of hospital admissions due to respiratory distress, they weren’t going to take any chances sending him out into the cool June evening air and we were admitted.

At 2am as my son gasped for air, I watched as his little chest expanded and contracted in such a way I don’t know how his ribs didn’t break. His terrified eyes boring holes in my eyes in desperation. All I could do was hold him as the nurses gave him oxygen working with him for hours until he could finally breath.

Once the situation had calmed, one of the nurses told me he was lucky to have already been in hospital when the episode hit. If we’d been at home needing to call an ambulance, there’s no telling what the outcome might’ve been. Five days in isolation in hospital, days on oxygen and a full course of antibiotics and I could take my little boy home again, so incredibly grateful I hadn’t just lost him.

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The massive hit to his already compromised immune system was too much for the challenges his little body was already facing. When other parents say whooping cough isn’t such a big deal anymore, I still find it hard not to completely lose it. Watching my son gasp for air for hours on end was excruciating. The aftermath of what that ordeal meant for his body is something we still battle three years later.

His asthma became worse than it had ever been, his already life-threatening allergies became worse, and as for those warts, they spread like wildfire, and they didn’t respond to any of the treatments the dermatologist tried. The treatments, while being almost prohibitively expensive, caused his sensitive skin to blister and bleed, leaving him unable to move his hands, all the while the wart virus spreading. They became so bad that his immunologist feared something more sinister was going on and had to do extensive testing to rule out some pretty major and horrendous illnesses.

Months later, bank account drained, the kind nurse at the dermatologist's surgery suggested I may have preferred to have just bought a luxury handbag or take my son on an overseas holiday instead of shelling out thousands of dollars to the dermatologist for treatment that made my son’s condition worse than it was before we’d walked in the door.

Thanks for the reminder lady!

What the hell was I going to do? By this stage my son was in first class at school. Kindergarten was all but a blur of medical appointments, ruling out the horrendous. Then one day like a gift from above, I was told about a gentle treatment that could be taken orally to kill the wart virus from the inside, instead of all the topical applications that were doing more harm than good.

So I purchased homeopathic thuja pilles from Newton's Pharmacy in Sydney. For $9.50 and no pain for my son to have to once again endure, it was worth a try.

After three days, the first two warts had disappeared. My little boy could not believe his eyes. Neither could I. For the first time in a long time, we had found something to help him, and it didn’t break the bank or hurt him in the process. Over the next six weeks, the warts started disappearing. Last in, first out, until finally that wart on the back of his hand that was now bigger than the size of my fingernail, was gone.

All thanks to some fancy little underrated herb called Thuja. His doctors could not believe their eyes either. It is one of those ridiculous stories that you wouldn’t believe unless you’d seen it. But most importantly, my son is smiling, no longer embarrassed by having over 100 warts to deal with. A year on, not a single wart has returned and the nightmare that was warts is all but forgotten in his busy mind.

Now to combat asthma and life-threatening allergies.

* The information in this post should not be considered as medical advice. If you or your child are suffering from warts, please consult a medical practitioner.