Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Although my weird sense of humor brings to mind the cartoon I saw as a child....and a later joke...Hare today, goon tomorrow. I can't remember if it was a Popeye or a Looney Tunes cartoon.....

Yesterday, I started losing my hair. Not as much as I did when I had Taxol and CAF, but enough. I hemmed and hawed about shaving it. And then I didn't do it.

Today, it started some more, and it was no longer fluffy, but flat....and I hemmed and hawed some more. It's funny, the last time, I had no problem going into the bathroom with my electric hair cutting razor and shaving it. This time, I wasn't so sure. Maybe because it had been 13 years instead of 4, I was having second thoughts. The clincher though, was when I was baking and I was terrified that I was going to lose hair into what I was cooking. And of course, my scalp began to be a little unhappy.

It's funny....when it begins to go, I can only describe it as hair follicles as having little individual headaches. I think it is from the hair sort of pulling and dropping.

When I went into treatment today, it was funny. In the waiting area, I sat next to a man and his wife. He was being treated for multiple myeloma. Out of the blue, he turned to me (and mind you, I had all my hair at the time...as I did in the first picture) and he said, with tears in his eyes, "The hardest part about this so far has been losing my hair.....and I don't know why." He had gone into a barber shop and had it cut short, but stopped short of it being shaved, and I would say his hair was about 1/4" long. He was 72, and I must admit I was of somewhat a sexist bent in my thinking as I wouldn't have imagined that that would have been as much of a problem for him.

I think, perhaps, that as long as you have your hair, it creates a barrier. You are not obviously fighting cancer, even though many chemotherapies now don't cause you to lose your hair, there are several, particularly "the big guns" which do. Once you cross that line, you are outwardly fighting cancer.....and that can be tough.

Don't get me wrong, having no hair is COLD. Especially in the winter, even inside. For a woman, a lot of femininity and who she is is expressed through her hair. For many women, losing hair is more traumatic than any other part of the cancer process. It isn't for me, but I really understand where women are coming from. The kicker is, many, if not most, insurance companies do not cover wigs as they are deemed "cosmetic."


So...here is a not great shot of me as I appear now...all shaven and shorn....at least I'm not the cow with the crumpled horn!