Peter McKay

This past week, my twin 13-year-old daughters had to go through a rite of passage required of every kid their age in our school district, an experience that has them walking into the classroom an innocent, wide-eyed tween and walking out a hardened, bitter cold case, a disillusioned stare in their eyes: It was time for the dreaded tapeworm video.

The actual video is an episode of a Discovery Channel show called "Eaten Alive!" which is designed to teach kids the scientific facts about parasites, bugs, worms and other creepy crawlies that take up residence in your body while you're not looking. But it's known to every 7th grader in the greater tri-boro region as the "tapeworm video," featuring gory recreations of medical cases in which people found themselves infested, inside and outside, with unwanted guests.

The teacher sent home a permission slip, warning that the show, while educational, would contain material that might make a middle schooler lose his lunch. (The actual notice used more formal and legal terms, but that's what it meant. A couple of years ago, one kid, according to legend, thought he was going to throw up, but then decided to cut to the chase and fainted dead away.) Any parent who felt their child could not handle the graphic images in the video could ask that their child be allowed to spend the period in the library, where some sort of alternate lesson would be available. (They should just give the conscientious objectors in the library a magazine. I'm sure it's hard to study while hearing your classmates' screams from down the hall.)

We had some trepidation about agreeing to this. Two years ago, when our son watched the same video in 7th grade, he came home shell-shocked. For weeks afterward he had the same dream: that he had a tapeworm and was running through our neighborhood asking somebody, anybody to pull it out. No one would.

(Understandable, even in a dream.) For years afterward, he refused to eat any kind of meat unless we assured him, in no uncertain terms, that it had been cooked to a proper temperature, and begged us at Christmas time to buy him a meat thermometer. He still chokes when we serve any kind of pork. When the first news stories of swine flu came over the TV, he stood up at the kitchen table, threw down his fork and marched out of the room.

Somehow, I was sheltered from the really gross stuff in middle school. All through 7th grade, I lived in dread of biology class where, we were promised, we would have a lab on dissection. My older brothers and sisters were all required to dissect frogs, and regaled me with stories designed to keep me up at night. When my turn came, though, they handed out trays with earthworms for dissection. I suppose there must have been some sort of budget crisis going at the time. The other kids were disappointed, but I was overjoyed. An earthworm, compared to a frog, was a walk in the park. I never had the desire to look at the innards of any creature. Still don't.

At dinner the night after the tapeworm video, I (stupidly) asked my daughters how school went. Within seconds, they were providing blow-by-blow descriptions. One guy had a tapeworm that his wife pulled out that was thiiiiis long, another had red bumps that moved, but soon turned out to be worms under his skin. Another person had worms coming out of his eyeballs.

As I sat there at the kitchen table, my girls describing in horrifying detail all the gross stuff they'd seen in the video, I started to feel just a little bit queasy. I looked around for my son, but he'd bolted from the table the minute the subject came up. He clearly was afraid of the return of "the dream."

As my darling daughters got into the spirit, each trying to top the other with the absolute grossest thing they'd seen that day, I pushed away from the table, hoping I wouldn't faint and walked out the door. My daughter called out after me, telling me I was about to miss the coolest part.

"Don't mind me!" I said, wiping my brow. "I'll be in the library with the other wimps!"

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