Tag: Haircut

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.

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.