April 21, 2006 - Day 3 - Week 3 - Bald Or Not To Be Bald

Chemo therapy impacts every individual differently, or so I have been fore-warned by former recipients of treatment and the health care professional community.  When I tell people that I feel pretty darn good and that I have had no ill effects other than wearing out around mid-afternoon they appear shocked.  Apparently the word is on the street that you are supposed to feel really bad when the chemicals start attacking the cancer. Bad is a relative term.  Today I feel good. Tomorrow may be a different story.

I asked the specialist Dr. Larry Piro what this was all about and he calmly told me that when the bright blue stuff starts accumulating in my system, somewhere probably around month three or four, that I will probably have some adverse reactions.  Nausea has been covered with something fed intravenously during treatment, but I have been cautioned to expect the mid-treatment blues, and perhaps my hair coming off in clumps in the shower.  One bit of advice offered was to shave it all off now so no one would see the process. I have declined that offer.

Frankly, since I was a senior at The Loomis School,  hair loss has not been a big deal for me; as a matter of record,  on the scale of 1-10, ten being bushy, I am already at about 4 or sparse with a chance of  moving towards a 3 – comb over time.   Opinions vary as to the beauty of the shape of my head from “you’ll look as good as Kojak” to “you might consider getting a wig now.”  My friend’s tongue in cheek comment hit home:  I sold women’s hairpieces, wiglets, falls, and hand tied human hair wigs, to help put myself through seminary.

Put this all together and one quickly realizes that the externals really do not matter in life. We have been sold a bill of goods on how we should look in our culture. There is a pre-conceived notion of beauty.  Bald is neither beautiful nor ugly, it just is what it is.  Actually it might even save me a few hundred bucks in haircuts over the course of the eight months.  My young friend Wendy, fighting the good fights against non – Hodgkin’s lymphoma was fashionable and proud in her designer scarf covering a completely bald head.

When one accepts one’s station in life, acknowledges the condition good or bad, then it, and whatever that it may be, begins to lose its power over you.  Cancer is something many many people have had to own.  When embraced and fully owned its grasp will soften and we can grow as people.  Acknowledging the physical changes is one part of that process.

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