“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”
When Joni Mitchell penned those lyrics, she was singing about human relationship. I am writing about my relationship with hair. (This is a little shallow, I know, but bear with me.) Most of my life, I’ve had this love/hate relationship with my mostly out-of-control head of curls. As a teenager, I remedied my unfashionable curls with the iron and ironing board and rollers the size of soup cans.
Curl wars
Then it was the giant brush and hair dryer, mostly wielded by a hair dresser until one day, waiting at the salon for my appointment, a woman came in, looked at me, and told her hair dresser she wants a perm just like me. She was in one chair, getting her hair saturated in chemicals that smell like rotten eggs and wound in tiny curlers while I was in another chair having mine yanked straight with giant brushes and blown dry. When the absurdity of this struck, I decided to bow out of the madness and had it cut to curl. As they say, the struggle has been real as my collection of hair product will attest.
Lately, though, I’ve been feeling the love. I’ve been loving the way my hair curls around my face. I’ve been loving the feel of the water sluicing through to my scalp in the shower. I’ve been loving the feel of the soft, spring breeze rippling through it. Because once I start chemotherapy, it will most likely be gone.
Divide and conquer
Our hair cells are the fastest to divide, promoting a continuous cycle of growth. You know what other cells do this? Cancer cells. Cancerous cells reproduce with reckless abandon, and the job of some of the chemotherapeutic agents most cancer patients get is to stop cell division. Unfortunately, chemotherapeutic agents are still not sophisticated enough to differentiate between normal cells in the body such as hair follicles and the bad guys. That’s why chemo patients go bald.
I grant you this is a small price to pay for killing the invaders. And for most patients undergoing chemo, hair loss is the least of what they go through. Initially, when I thought about the side effects of chemotherapy, the hair part seemed pretty inconsequential. I would certainly choose going bald over a damaged heart or digestive tract. But of course, I don’t get to pick the way in which chemotherapy slaps me around. Except, possibly, with the hair. So, I started thinking, “wouldn’t it be a small but real victory if I could chalk one up to Arlene and keep my hair?” “Wouldn’t that give me a chance to hang onto a small piece of the normal as I go through this?” And, I do have that chance. That chance is 46%, calculated by a nurse practitioner in the oncology office.
Give hair a chance
All I have to do, to give hair a chance, is to cough up a rather fat chunk of change and endure what is known as a cool cap on each of my infusion days.
Here’s how it works. You soak your hair with a spray-in conditioner. Then you place a cap on your head which freezes your scalp. I am told the sensation of freezing one’s scalp is quite unpleasant (think miserable, rotten, awful) until it goes numb. The idea is that if the hair follicles freeze, blood flow is constricted and less of the chemotherapy drug gets into the follicles.
I was told that most people still lose some hair, some still lose all or most, but the hair will grow back better and faster if the follicles are not left to drink the cell-killing brew.
What would you do?