Hair

Hair. I have always had a lot of it - thick, curly hair that I mistakenly brushed out as a kid but it was the 80s, so thankfully, I blended in. My eastern European genes also meant a unibrow that made me look like a cross between the Super Mario Brothers, and Burt from Sesame Street, so around age 12 I started waxing 'em. If you've met me only in the past thirteen years, I assure you what's currently sitting above my eyes is 1/10th of what once resided there. As I got older and headed off to college, I learned new and exciting secrets of hair maintenance from my similarly blessed sisters, and waxing, plucking, straightening, gelling, and mousing have been part of the routine ever since.

Since hair tends to get a lot of my time and attention, I appreciated the irony of how difficult it was, at the age of 23 to cope with the temporary alopecia that accompanies many types of chemotherapy, including my ABVD regiment. My sister got me a whole bunch of fabulous hats, scarves and head shmates, and as my hair thinned, I wore them, got used to them, and even tried to appreciate the additional accessory. And significantly, my hair didn't completely fall out, which actually allowed me the ability to look almost like I was just accessorizing. Maybe I'm fooling myself, but there were a lot of days in those 8 or so months, where I really enjoyed feeling like I was passing for someone normal and healthy. Though usually I just ended up getting mistaken for a married Orthodox woman - resulting in some priceless awkward moments, including one with a certain ambassador from a small, democratic, Jewish state in the Middle East.

But in private moments, before the hat went on, as I looked at myself in the mirror, as I showered, as I combed my hair, the loss of that identifying marker, that hair which I had done battle with and had learned to love, was incredibly difficult. And moments that a person with a full head of hair could experience - sleep-overs with guests, sharing hotel rooms with co-workers as I traveled for my job, respectfully removing head-wear during the national anthem, hanging out with roommates just before bed, or just a swift gust of wind - became another completely new and difficult-to-manage circumstance.

The head nurse at the GW Cancer Clinic, Kathy, told me just before my first round of chemotherapy that she thought women looked beautiful bald. Regardless of whether I agreed, I found myself thinking often about that statement as a source of inspiration and comfort. And I told myself over and over that it would grow back, and indeed, it did.

I began chemo 16 days ago, and, as I was told it would, my hair began falling out on day 14. The past 72 hours have been a repeat of what I experienced the first time around, only highly accelerated - my hair hasn't thinned slowly over the course of weeks and months this time. At first it was clumps in the shower,  and the minor trauma of watching dozens of hairs at a time swirl toward the drain. Then, throughout yesterday and today, absent-mindedly twirling a curl around my finger meant pulling out that curl, still fully intact. Each time this happened, I was caught totally off-guard and felt a panicky shock. And the past two nights, I have woken up nearly every hour, to feel my pillow to see if it had all fallen out, as is very common in chemotherapy patients. 

Around 1 am tonight, (this morning?) I just couldn't take the hair falling out all over my apartment and out in public, and I felt that I couldn't cope with another night of interrupted sleep. The inevitability of my total hair loss, in just a couple more days regardless of how much I washed it or touched it became clear. So I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, and gently ran my fingers through it, feeling the curls simply give way in my hands, like when you very gently touch the petals of a flower that's dying and they drop off so easily. It was such an odd, surreal sensation. I ran my hands through my hair over and over again, piling hair in the sink, until I looked down at it and found myself staring at the back of my own head. It will grow back, I said aloud, it will grow back, it will grow back, it will grow back. 

It's an astonishing thing to look into the mirror at a reflection of yourself that you haven't ever seen and never imagined you would - I guess the feeling is akin to dying your hair a radically different color or getting a piercing or maybe the first time you see your body after giving birth. Even if you knew a drastic change was coming, maybe even elected to do to yourself, the transformation still surprises you. And I tried to look into the mirror and see what Kathy sees when she looks at a bald head - something different, but beautiful. I wish I could, and maybe when the shock wears off, I can work toward that goal. But right now, all I can do is try to stop crying and try to get some of the sleep I was seeking by taking things into my own hands in the first place.