My hair

In 2016 I went through chemotherapy. I was told that I would start losing my hair after the first infusion, right around 2 weeks in. So to prepare for that loss I got a really short hair cut. It was cute and spunky and prob not a look I would ever do again haha. And right on time, 12 days after my first infusion I was running my fingers through my hair and a whole lot of hair came out. Then a couple of days later hubby buzzed my hair off in my kitchen with the kids there as a welcome distraction.

I wanted to cut my hair and then shave it on my own terms but the unexpected happened. No one prepared me for the day I would be in the shower and my hair, although shaved, wouldn’t stop coming out of my head. It was physically painful, it was overwhelming, it was traumatic. All of the tiny hairs that were left in my scalp and hadn’t fallen out on to my pillow or in my hats, were now flooding the floor of my shower. I wept. I sobbed. It was just hair I kept telling myself, but that was me trying to rationalize this experience. There is nothing normal about losing my hair at 31.

The next major insult to injury was losing my eyebrows and eyelashes; I felt like an alien. You loose hair everywhere, but the weirdest place to loose hair that know one “sees” is the hair in your nose. My nose was running all of the time. The silver lining was not shaving my legs and arm pits for a good long while.

You might be wondering why I’m telling you about this experience now; why I want to take you down memory lane. I appear to have all of my hair still and I don’t look sick. MBC is a hidden illness for many of us because we look normal and we are doing normal things. But my hair has changed a lot. As it grew back I had curls and I loved it! But today I am reliving that traumatic experience of 2016 every day, in slow motion.

Each time I take a shower or brush my hair, and absurd amount of hair comes out. I know normal hair loss, and this isn’t normal. My ponytail has decreased by about 50% in the last year. Additionally, my hair growth has slowed down dramatically. So I am losing hair at a slower rate than I did in 2016, but it’s still falling out.

It just comes with the lack of hormones, or because of thyroid dysfunction, or as a side effect from my medication, and likely a combo of all of it. I don’t know if it will ever stop or if my hair will ever grown back to the thickness it once was. I expect not. You may never notice the thinning, but I do.

I don’t have a love affair with my hair, but it does make me feel feminine and I know my husband and kids like it. It keeps my head warm and I generally love having hair more than not having hair. I’d like to hang on to as much of it as I can for as long as possible.

Recently though, I decided to order myself a couple of cute hats from Style Esteem. They have a wonderful story so check it out. I am excited about wearing these more frequently as my hair thins. They keep my head warm and they help me to feel feminine. I also have some other tools in my arsenal to cover the thinning when I am not wearing a hat. Having some control over how this disease affects my appearance is nice.

This is just another part of perpetual cancer treatment that isn’t pink or pretty or easy. Collateral damage as we say in Cancerland.