Cancer Sucks: Part Four

I have always liked my hair. In grade school, every morning my mom would comb my hair with some kind of green goop in a jar that she would dip the comb into. I'm not sure what it was called, but it would dry into a solid hard shell. With a few quick moves my mom would mold my hair into a big pompadour that would stand up to a gale force wind, and not a hair would move at least until lunch time. Later in life I wanted to see just how long my hair would grow, but after a few years I realized what a pain in the ass long hair was, and I reverted to the short well groomed look.

After I was diagnosed with the cancer, and before treatment started, the doctor warned me that I would lose my hair during chemo-therapy. Even with this forewarning, it was still very disturbing, a few weeks into it, to be standing in the shower watching gobs of my hair coming out and flowing down the drain. I was finding hair in my bed, I was finding hair everywhere. If you didn't know any better you'd think I had a big old German Sheppard dog in the house. My solution to this was to shave everything off, everything. I looked weird, but at least I didn't have to deal with the hair thing until the chemo treatments were done. So it was with great relief when twelve weeks of chemo-therapy was finished, and I could get off the meds and slowly my hair started to come back. It came in very curly at first and stayed that way for about a year. Curly or straight, I will tell you one thing, I'd rather be bald than not be alive. Thanks to the doctors, and my friends and family, here I am twenty years later, fat and sassy, totally cancer free, and wearing my hair shorter than ever.