Day 16 – My Healing Journey

Just as my oncologist had predicted, I woke up on day 13, went to brush my hair and was met with a huge clump of hair in the brush.  Since I had been pre-warned, I was expecting it so instead of belaboring the issue and moaning about it, I decided to be proactive and just shave my head instead of watch it fall out slowly every day.  To me, that would’ve been much more traumatic to experience.

I’ve seen plenty of movies where the cancer patients were crying over their hair loss, but to me, this was something that wasn’t “painful” so I was very grateful. While I love my hair, this was something that I could actually deal with without a lot of emotion because I knew it would grow back.  What I didn’t know until much later, is that it grows back curly and kinky and there is no rhyme or reason. 

It just started me thinking about things like “If it’s doing that to my hair, what is it doing to the other parts of my body?”  All the things I didn’t want to think about after making the decision to undergo the chemotherapy treatments.

If you’ve ever tried to shave someone’s hair or beard or sideburns, you know that it’s not as easy as it seems. It took me quite a while to get all the hair off of my head and I couldn’t get it very close along the top in the back so I just left it a little uneven.  I would curse this lax attitude later during the grow out period but I had no idea how it would affect me at the time.  I took out one of my wigs, and began the journey of “Instant Hair” and wearing a wig every day.  The biggest challenge was trying to keep it on my head with nothing there to hold it in place, especially on a windy day.

I tried the rubber headbands, but those just left me with yet another headache. I tried the hair net which worked a little bit better but in the end, it was just my bare head underneath. There are a lot of windy days in Albuquerque, so I really had to be careful when I went out in order to keep it on my head.  I was always self-conscious and felt like everyone was looking at my head and thinking “That is definitely a wig she’s wearing”.  After awhile, I found some additional wigs that looked more like my normal hair so I settled in for the long haul.

I will say that on the positive side, I thoroughly enjoyed the flexibility of not having to go through the steps of washing, conditioning, blow drying and styling so that was a definite plus for me.  It was so simple to just throw the wig on and walk out the door at a moments notice, rather than fuss around in the bathroom to get my hair just right.  Just another plus in those days that seemed to hold a lot of minuses.