Tag: The Cancer Project

The Cancer Project: Hair Part II

Hair Part I is here.

I started losing my hair after the second chemo treatment. 

It was terrifying. 

You don’t realize what losing your due to chemo means until you’ve experienced it first hand. It’s not like your hair sheds more, as it does with women postpartum or when men start losing their hair after a certain age. 

It falls out in large clumps, without warning. You brush your hand casually against your hair and are left with a thick clump of it in your hand. It was like something out of a cheap horror movie, like some sort of farce. I had no idea my body could do that. Why hadn’t anyone told me that this was how it was going to be?

It also hurt. It was if my scalp suddenly felt the weight of each and every hair, and it couldn’t take it anymore. Imagine the feeling of having weights tied to each hair follicle, constantly tugging your hair down, and you’ll get some kind of idea how it feels.

I lost the most hair during the first shower after my second chemo treatment, and I couldn’t get to the hairdresser fast enough. “Off, I want all of it off!” I commanded him. He gave me a buzzcut that made me look like a punky 16 year old, but I was relieved. My scalp stopped hurting, and I didn’t see hair falling out in clumps anymore. Yes, my hair kept falling out throughout the treatments — normal hair falling out an a strange fuzzy plume growing instead only to fall out too — but I didn’t feel it and I didn’t see the scary clumps. That was good enough for me. 

You see it was these clumps that gave me a vivid visual representation of just what my body was going through. You don’t otherwise see the damage the chemotherapy is doing to each and every one of your cells — you just feel it. So when I go that buzzcut I was taking control, pushing the damage away so I could better handle it. Other patients react differently to this message — oftentimes with denial, or by fighting it. They hold on to every wisp of hair, they hope against hope that somehow they won’t be affected. 

At the time I thought they were being silly and immature and just causing themselves unnecessary pain. I know better now. This journey is excruciatingly hard and scary for anyone who goes through it. What gets you through, how you react to it, these are personal things that cannot and should not be judged, even by a fellow cancer patient. Some of us need to mourn through our hair. I needed to learn that and accept that. One of the things that helped me do that is the bitter realization that we live in a world where losing your hair isn’t a superficial change. 

More on that in Hair part III. 

The Cancer Project: Hair, Part 1

April, 2022

So there’s a whole thing going on with Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars for making fun of his wife’s hair. Jada Pinkett Smith has alopecia, which is something that one of my oldest friends suffers from as well. Hair can fall out due to a multitude of reasons, from autoimmune diseases to genetics, traction, poor nutrition and stress. But I’m not here to talk about Jada Pinkett Smith and her alopecia, or even about my friend’s journey with alopecia: I’m here to talk about cancer related alopecia.

The very first thing my doctor told me when she came to my hospital room to talk about treatments was that I’d lose my hair. I was on oxygen at the time because the tumour in my mediastinum (that the middle bit of your body, where your most important veins go, right up against the heart and lungs) was so large it was restricting my lungs enough to make me need oxygen to stay alive. At that point I had barely been sleeping in days, I had barely been eating, the main thing that I was doing was inhaling and exhaling, fighting for each breath. I had been waiting all day for a hematologist-oncologist (that’s a hematologist, a blood doctor, who specializes in blood cancers, which is what I had – Hodgkin’s Lymphoma) to take up my case and start taking care of me. I was very happy that the doctor that I wanted took up my case despite her already heavy caseload: she was kind and brilliant, and that’s not a common combination. She came in to my room with the paperwork for the chemo treatments (you have to give consent to getting poison pumped into your system, as chemo is basically poison in a dose that is meant to kill the cancer but leave you alive). 

And the first thing she told me was that she was sorry, but that I was going to lose my hair.

I had read up about the side effects of the treatment that I was about to go through (ABVD chemotherapy), and I was afraid for my heart, my lungs, nausea, getting a chemical burn during treatment,  and neuropathy. The last thing on my mind, the last thing I was worried about was my hair. The mouth sores seemed more scary. 

The hair loss theme returned during my first meeting with the cancer centre’s social worker. An efficient yet caring battle-axe of a lady she told that from her experience ABVD patients didn’t lose all of their hair, they just lost most of it. She was looking at my head at the time, and it was before my 2nd treatment, so I still had all of my hair. My doctor had told me that the hair-loss happens after the 2nd treatment, and she was, of course, 100% correct.

Then there were the women in the closed cancer Facebook groups. I had joined a few, one for Lymphoma patients, one for young adults with cancer. They were a source of information and camaraderie, and a good amount of gallows humour. One of the women in the group, a new member like me, said that she would lose her mind if she lost her hair and asked if there’s a way to prevent it. Another asked about wigs and young children: is there a way to have the wig attached so that they can’t pull it off. 

I thought that they were all being a bit silly. Yes, I know, that’s unkind and insensitive and I’d learn better with time, but I’m being honest here. I was literally fighting for my breath before the treatments, and they allowed me to breath. The side effects were far from being a walk in the park, but losing your hair didn’t hurt (I was wrong), and was just a superficial change (I was wrong), and a temporary one, so why focus on that and not on more serious side effects? (I was clueless).