Thursday, January 24, 2008

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.

10 comments:

  1. "Losing your hair during treatment" is the ONLY thing they warn you about. I actually enjoyed that part & maybe that sounds weird, but being female going bald was something I would never have thought of doing on my own. It was an interesting experience just to see how other people reacted. "No I didn't shave it for political reasons." The pain, nausea & dizzy stuff they neglected to mention, but with today's meds it wasn't too awful. I cringe when I think of what you went through 20 yrs. ago before they had fine tuned side effect relief. You had to be some tough stuff to go through all that---and drive back home again!!!

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  2. I remember shaving your head for you too. In the past 25 years I shaved both my best friends heads because of cancer. I think I've got a track record going. Now if my next best friend gets cancer and I have to shave their head I think that would be more than a coincident.

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  3. The sad news is that not everyone survives. As I write this my cousin Lauren is in hospice care for cancer.

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  4. and one of my high school classmates died 2 weeks ago after battling sarcoma. He was 28.

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  5. Another reason to quit smoking before it's too late.

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  6. I'm sure glad we've had the additional 20 years to be friends and look forward to 30 or 40 more. I feel great and have no plans on leaving any time soon.

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  7. Alan: Be glad you still have a full head of hair. Some of us haven't been as fortunate.

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  8. All the more reason that we should be kind and helpful to others as we never know when our time may come.

    RIP: Heath Ledger

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  9. It was called DIPPITTY-DOO...green goop in a jar!

    Nice blog!

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