Tag: Hair Loss

Things I Wish I’d Known About Breast Cancer, Part 2

This post continues what I started in the last post…a few things about breast cancer that I wasn’t aware of at the time of my diagnosis. Knowing the following would have made things a little less stressful:

1. Lumpectomy is a relatively uncomplicated surgery. I wish someone had explained this to me because I was a total wreck going into surgery (which happened to be the only surgery that I had ever had up to that point, making everything 10 times worse). Although I had decided against a full mastectomy, I was still so afraid of what a lumpectomy would entail, what I’d look like and how long it would take me to recover from losing a chunk of flesh.

The reality was…I was back at work the next week. No drainage tubes, no need for heavy analgesics — just a couple of ibuprofin the night after surgery because skipping coffee that morning resulted in a headache, but that was it. It was even hard to tell that I’d had my lump excised. Wish I could go back to my earlier self and tell her not to worry.

Stethoscopes are emotionless. Oncologists can seem to be too, but that’s by design.

2. Doctors are not in a hurry to give you good news. I think there’s a general feeling among medical professionals that there’s so much that can go poorly during cancer treatment that your doc isn’t going to go out of their way to pump you full of optimism. They probably practice keeping an emotionless face as they deliver all sorts of news, both good and bad. As a patient, however, I watched every flicker on my oncologist’s face for an indication of how things were “really” going. I feared that there was something he wasn’t telling me.

It wasn’t until perhaps a year or so later when I was expressing my fears to him about possible abnormalities inside my body that he uttered the phrase, “but you have your health”…and I was taken aback because I had never heard him sound so positive. It was almost a shock to hear him confirm that I was actually considered healthy.

3. Don’t expect things to be the same as before. Accepting that part of your life has changed will make it much easier to go on. This took me a while to appreciate because I was expecting to get back to doing and feeling everything the same as before my diagnosis.

But chemo (and eventually, age) pushed me through menopause, and I had to come to grips with, say, a high-intensity interval workout requiring more recovery time and that I had trouble remembering people’s names. Once I got to that point of acceptance, life after cancer treatment became easier, although it did take a number of years to get there.

4. Hair takes a while to grow back in. The reason I created posts with photographs that illustrated the cancer journey that my hair went through (here and here) was because I could not find good photos on the internet documenting the process. I did see images of a woman a few weeks after stopping chemo with little stubs already visible, but that was not my experience and it made my anxiety over my slow regrowth even worse.

Walking around with no hair was getting old and I was getting more desperate by the day to see evidence of sprouts!

If you’ve ever googled your chemo drug name + “hair loss”, you understand the fear: the first search result is usually a law office gathering info on behalf of cancer patients whose hair never grew back!

It took a number of months before my folicles woke up and actually started growing. I remember the moment that I finally saw growth on the front of my head and it was as if the heavens had opened up and divine light poured out onto me. Seriously. I would have avoided a lot of stress if someone had just told me that it’s gonna be a while.

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Ok, ok, to be fair, my oncologist did urge patience with the regrowth but I was a jumbled mess of nerves and was feeling overwhelmed. All the internet propaganda about both (1) other women having much faster regrowth, or (2) other women never getting their hair back terrified me. Note to self: when feeling desperate, stay off the internet!

Another Hairy Situation

It wasn’t until almost a year and a half after my last chemo that I finally got a professional, high-caliber haircut. After an adult life filled with boring medium-to-long hair in a ponytail, this was an about-face: a short and very stylish ‘do.

I don’t think I would have ventured to try this if I hadn’t been pushed into it by chemo. Then again, cancer pushed all my boundaries further than I would have gone on my own. I’ve always played it safe, but with cancer, there was no “safe”.

When chemo took my hair, I had no say in it. As the hair grew back, it did so slowly and in a pattern that was not attractive. Nothing I could do about it but be patient.

Front shot of my awesome new pixie cut! The hair on top is full and feels thick. I love the look!
Back view. This was the part of my head that unnerved me in the middle of the night. It felt so bare and brought back all sorts of scary feelings.

But in 2019, I was in charge and could decide at what length I wanted to keep my hair. I’d been surprised by how much I liked the new “me” with a short style, so I thought I’d be adventurous and go even shorter. My hairstylist happily obliged and this past week I got a full-on pixie cut that was absolutely adorable. It felt great to be calling the shots and reclaiming myself and my look.

But something unexpected happened that night. I woke in the darkness, unsettled with a touch of panic. My head felt bare, like my hair had crossed the threshold between short and “omigodthatisTOOshort”. For a split second, everything felt out of control again.

It took a bit to calm myself down in the pre-dawn hours of the day. I had wanted to be brave and cut my hair shorter, but it elicited those old feelings of the unknown. Wait, I reminded myself, all of this was “known” now. I knew my hair would grow back again. Add to that, several days before, I’d had a mammogram that confirmed I was in remission. So there was no need for the fears.

Be that as it may, it wasn’t so simple to let the feelings go. My hair carried powerful associations that had been seared into my unconscious mind. Losing locks to chemo meant relinquishing a part of me. While I thought I already understood its importance — I’ve written about it in a number of posts — it wasn’t until that night that I realized how tightly my hair was wound up in all those memories and sensations.

You’d think that once the hair grew in, everything would return to normal and there’d be nothing more to say about it. Not so, I’m finding, as I get hit in the face by these unexpected reminders of exactly what having cancer meant to me. Sorting everything out seems to get more complicated the further away I get from treatment. Who knew survivorship could be such a head trip?

The Long And Short Of It: Hair Through Chemo And Beyond, Part 1

It’s been almost a year and a half since my last chemo infusion. This past week, I treated myself to a chic haircut at a real salon (instead of going to a cheaper chain hair-cuttery) and I’m so delighted with the result. I reflected on what it took to get here, hair-wise, by going through the photos I took of this whole experience. This post series chronicles my cancer journey as witnessed by my scalp.

Please note that these photos were taken for my own records, without the expectation that I’d be posting them online, so I apologize for the quality.

May 13, 2017: My first chemo treatment was April 27th and just over two weeks later, my hair started coming out in handfuls. I had long hair so the loss was noticeable and very distressing. Time for it to come off!
My husband started by taking off the bulk of my ponytail first.
I got to live out all my punk hair dreams…
…and even spent a few minutes channeling Riff-Raff from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
Finally it was done. No looking back! As miserable as it was losing my hair and crying through most of the head-shaving process, I now felt like I had a modicum of control over this whole crazy situation.
June 8, 2017: This was the day of my third chemo session. Oddly, my hair had actually grown but then seemed to freeze. If I pulled on individual hairs, they would come out easily.
Needless to say, I didn’t mess with them! While it’s not readily apparent in the photos, there’s way more bald scalp than hair there, with significant loss at the front.
July 3, 2017: Yeah, not looking so healthy here. Loads of the tiny hairs had given up and dropped out, and I was having issues with a dry, flaky scalp. Honestly, I hadn’t realized that it looked this bad until I saw the photo.
July 20, 2017: My scalp was confused. Some obstinate hairs continued to grow, but most hadn’t, giving me a great view of the horrible moles on my head!

August 18, 2017: My last chemo had been August 10th. There were only enough of these longer hairs on my head to make me look like Yoda, but without the big ears. You can see the rough shape that my nails are in (but that’s a story for another post).
September 6, 2017: There were hairs on my head, but they were not really growing in. It had been a month since my last chemo and I was hoping to see significant signs of life. But, nope.
September 16, 2017: Here’s one of those never-say-die hairs. I was also noticing downy, baby-chick hairs but no appreciable coverage. Wow, I have huge pores!
October 6, 2017: It had been almost two months since my last chemo, and I was convinced that I should be getting more growth. My hairs were super-fine and my scalp squeaked when I tried to run my fingers through them. See the light shining off my head? I could blind someone with that!
October 11, 2017: Yes, this photo was taken only 5 days after the one above it, but I was starting to get desperate and taking loads of photos. I was convinced that I should be getting more growth than I was, and had spent too much time on cancer forums reading posts by women whose hair hadn’t come back at all (bad idea!). I was experiencing growth but their fine texture made it seem like there was very little there.
October 17, 2017: At this point, there was a mixture of sparse longer hairs and the super-soft fuzz, but the overall view still screamed, “BALD!” Family members enjoyed patting my head and cooing.
November 2, 2017: Almost three months after finishing chemo, I still saw light glinting off the front of my scalp. I could wear hats because the back of my head had more hair coverage. Regrowth was happening in a sort of reverse male pattern baldness. There WERE little sprouts on the front of my head, but they were taking their own sweet time.
November 11, 2017: Finally! The hairs in front were definitely coming in. All the growth was soft and fine, but it seemed like the follicles had woken up. I found it easier to be patient now that there was definite promise of a full head of hair in my future.

Part 2 covers hair growth through 2018…

When Is A Haircut More Than A Haircut?

When you’ve spent half a year hairless.

I am getting my hair cut today, but this is no ordinary trim. After losing all my hair to chemotherapy in 2017, I find myself in a completely foreign realm: short hair after a lifetime of long locks.

Losing my hair was like losing part of my identity. We’re used to bald men — it’s even hip to shave your head as a man. But bald women are seen as oddities, because our hair is tied to our perception of beauty. A woman with no hair is perceived as an oddity — something is wrong. You’re sick.

So hair regrowth took on a particularly important meaning for me after chemo. It wasn’t simply that I finished treatment — I was reclaiming myself. My first haircut, in February 2018, when my ends were getting unruly, was terrifying. I hated the thought of cutting what I’d “worked” so hard to regrow. When you’re a cancer patient and hear horror stories about permanent baldness, getting hair back is not taken for granted. I didn’t finally exhale until I saw little sprouts at the front, and that didn’t happen until about November 2017, three months after my last chemo. I had no idea that it would take so long for my entire scalp to wake back up.

I feel so…different. Maybe a new haircut will help?

Now, almost a year and a half after chemo, I still look so different from the pre-cancer me, and I get a shocking jolt every time I see my reflection. It’s me, but it’s not me — I guess it’s the “new” me. I’m different and there’s no going back to who I was before. Sometimes that leaves me feeling lost and disoriented.

My husband feels similarly. Cancer affects those we love too, and as I struggle to define myself, he works to understand how I’ve changed. As I’m not familiar to myself, I am also unfamiliar to him. While it’s true we all change as we age and are not the same people we were when we met, normally those changes are slower and we have some control over them. But cancer is the hurtling locomotive that plows through your life and tosses everything you’ve known to the sides. Cancer forces you to pay attention.

So I’ll march into the salon to delve into new-short-hairstyle territory and put on a brave face to make cancer recovery into a positive experience — one that I didn’t ask for, but here I am anyway.