New Year's Day! It smacks of fresh starts, well-intentioned resolutions, new beginnings, all a welcome change of perspective after yesterday, perhaps the hardest day that I've had since learning of my cancer.
At the end of my Christmas visit to Nantes, I noticed that my scalp was really tender, and even though I had been warned that I would lose my hair and I had even made an appointment with my hairdresser to have it shaved off on the anticipated date, I still managed to tell myself that perhaps my winter hat was the cause of this discomfort. Returning to Brussels, I tugged on my hair just to test, and nothing happened, so I cancelled the appointment for the Grace Jones cut. I continued to notice that my scalp was not just tender but down right painful and that gave no signs of letting up. It was even hard to find a comfortable way to put my head on the pillow to sleep.
Yesterday morning while taking my shower, I started to shampoo my hair. In disbelief, I pulled my wet hands away only to see them covered in my hair. For me, forewarned was not enough to be forearmed. I don't think that any amount of reading, sharing or discussing could have prepared me psychologically to having my own hair falling out in clumps. I panicked and started to cry. Fear welled up and washed over me. Fear of what? Being bald? No, fear of dying. Totally irrational, but there it was.
It was just intolerable to run a brush through my hair and have what seemed like a head of hair in the brush. Impossible to get in to my hairdresser on New Year's Eve, so I asked Mr. T to put me out of my misery by cutting it all off. What a bittersweet scene in the bathroom: he set up my office chair and tactfully turned it away from the mirror, covered my shoulders with a towel and set to with his moustache scissors. Snip, snip, snip! Snif, snif, snif! I cried as he cut, leaving me with about 1/2 inch of hair all over my head. Mr. T, well-known in the family circle for his somewhat twisted sense of humour, assured me that I would make a big hit in a gay bar. If he keeps this sort of reassurance up, I may have to consider my options.
We headed for Heuchin (our place in France) for the weekend. We were invited to have a quiet dinner at with our neighbors, Eric and Nathalie. But Nathalie had other bigger things in mind and had invited Eric's sister and her husband, and another couple and their kids, all fine folks that we had met before. Despite my apprehensions, I stayed through most of the meal, but my heart was just not in it and I left at a diplomatic moment, hearing the unmistakable "call of the bed". I only wanted to go to sleep, so Eric gallantly escorted me next door.
So today is another day and I don't feel quite so freaked out. Mr. T reminded me that the hair loss is a really good sign because it means that the chemo is doing what it is supposed to be doing. If it is taking out my hair cells, then it is doing the same thing to the cancer cells.
One of the tasks for this weekend, besides writing Christmas cards and cleaning out the chicken coop, will be to finish off the task that we started yesterday by shaving my head.
Fortunately, Mr T finally got around to repairing my hairdryer this morning. Better late than never, n'est-ce pas? ;-)
Cry, Curse, Laugh...onward into the New Year! Powerful lessons. Thanks for sharing them.
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