Hair Regrowth – Frantic Shanti

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!

What No One Told Me About Cancer and Hair Regrowth

More than two years after finishing chemo, after being afraid my hair would not grow back, and after being delighted with the way it did…I’m experiencing follicular drama, once again.

Once chemo was over, my sleepy follicles took their time getting roused into action. To say that I worried would be an understatement. I was still caught up in the unfairness of being smacked down by breast cancer. Confronting the possibility that after enduring the nastiness of cancer treatment, I might not get my hair back? That was too much.

Well, if you’ve read my posts on hair, you’ll know that my hair finally did come back. And there was much rejoicing.

And that’s where my hair posts stopped. But as happens with these kinds of things, that wasn’t the end of the story.

While still bald, I had been fed reassuring anecdotes by well-meaning supporters about hair coming back even better than before, lush locks that served as well-deserved rewards for undergoing the anxiety and strain of cancer diagnosis and treatment.

But as much as cancer patients feel like they don’t know what’s going on, those around them have even less of an idea. They want you to “stay positive” at all costs, so they overload you with lots of good news.

The forest isn’t as dense as it used to be.

By now you can probably guess where I’m going with this. Because in Spring 2019, things started changing. Within a few months, my uber-cool spikey rockstar hair lost fullness as my strands thinned. Then, I saw “bald spots”.

So, let me explain how I define “bald spots”: these areas have hair, but due to the color (um, WHITE) and thinness, the hair seems translucent, even transparent. And along the part? You can’t see the roots well at all.

My reward for enduring cancer is invisible hair.

My hairstylist confirmed that the hair that comes back in after chemo is different from the hair that eventually settles in. And mine had settled.

Tamoxifen also played a role, since choking off estradiol and moving into menopause will age both you and your hair, particularly if you are premenopausal going into treatment, as I was. So this should have been expected, but in the hustle and bustle of all the other little things, like, oh, wondering if you’re going to survive the ordeal, no one really talks about the fact that there will be other changes that take place.

And now, I’ve been off tamoxifen for almost six weeks, but can’t tell whether there’s been any regrowth, not that I expect any. I meet with my oncologist this Tuesday and you can bet your panties he’s going to prescribe an aromatase inhibitor for me, so the pharmaceutical depression of estrogen will continue.

I am dealing. Mostly. Am I happy about this? Of course not. The last few years have felt like running a gauntlet of misery, but one where I’m only hobbled and not completely taken out. Given that, I’m ashamed of complaining, as there are many others doing so much worse. But not ashamed enough to stop writing about it, as this is my reality and it affects me. If I’m going through this, there’s a good chance that many others are too.

I’m supposed to be moving on and leaving cancer behind me, right? But like an annoyingly nosy neighbor, it keeps waving at me through my kitchen window, reminding me that it’s living next door.

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 2

Part 1 of this series chronicled the loss of my hair to chemo and subsequent gradual regrowth through the end of 2017. Part 2 is the “beyond” part of “chemo and beyond”. These photos are somewhat self-indulgent because, well, hair does grow and so whether I’ve got short bangs or spikey hair doesn’t really have anything to do with chemo. Nonetheless, I wanted to provide some perspective regarding how long it takes until a cancer survivor’s head doesn’t look like a cancer survivor’s head.

I need to stress that these photos were originally taken so that I could monitor my progress, not with the intention of posting them for all to see, so the quality may be lacking.

February 6, 2018: I didn’t take photos for a number of weeks — probably because once I was convinced that my hair was growing in properly, I mellowed out about scrutinizing my scalp. This was my general look into the early part of 2018, a hat that showed the longer growth (around the back) but hid the painfully short hair on top. I had my very first post-chemo haircut in February.

February 17, 2018: This is after that first haircut. I got a trim around the ears and back, but the hairstylist left the top alone — good thing since it was still really short. I started venturing out without a hat. It was amazing to feel the breeze in my hair!

March 29, 2018: I loved this stage and got a lot of compliments about this look, in part because the hair on top was incredibly soft (all new growth!) and touchable.

April 24, 2018: A view from above showing how full the regrowth was.

April 24, 2018: A front view of the same stage.

May 19, 2018: Now we’re getting somewhere! The hair is noticeably longer and showing more weight.

June 27, 2018: The hair is getting unruly. Need a haircut soon!

August 17, 2018: This marks a little over a year after my last chemo. I got my second haircut in July, and this was the first trim on top. This was another stage that I really liked even though it had a mullet-y feel. I was channeling Rod Stewart here.

August 17, 2018: A view from the top. There was more color creeping back into my hair and it was feeling very substantial.

November 19, 2018: Fast-forward a couple of months. After some more growth, I went for my third haircut. The hairstylist was distracted and did a major chop job on my hair. A bad cut always sucks, but when you’ve gone through chemo, it’s even worse.

January 11, 2019: Almost two months after that last cut, the lack of symmetry was obvious (combed out for effect here); she had chopped off more hair from one side than the other. I waited to let it grow more so that the new stylist (not going back to the old place!) would have more to work with.

January 16, 2019: Finally, went to a highly-rated salon (should have gone there in the first place, but…) and got a cut I love!

January 17, 2019: I can spike it for a seriously edgy look, or keep it tamer so that I don’t freak out everyone at work.

And so ends this journey. What my hair looks like now is vastly different from when I began with my cancer diagnosis, but as I’ve said previously, I am not the person inside that I was before, and now my outside reflects that. After a year of treatment followed by a year of regaining my footing, I’m edgier and willing to push my boundaries. Cancer didn’t give me a choice but to move forward, and that’s what I’m doing.

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.