Bald, Balder, Baldest
This is for Beth, who will be bald very soon.
I’ve gone bald from chemotherapy at least three times. (Chemo brain, you know. I may have forgotten a time or two.)
The first time was traumatic—I cried, I raged, I agonized over the way people, total strangers, responded to my bald head: with pity. The second time, I had fun with it. I decorated my head with a henna tattoo and flaunted my baldness. The third time, I wore a wig for the first and only time, as a concession to the sensibilities of my then-14-year-old younger son, who did not want to be seen at school with a bald mother.
Right now, I am taking oral Cytoxan, and my hair has thinned, but I am not bald. I don’t have much body hair, though, and my eyebrows and eyelashes are hard to see (the “space alien” look). My eyebrow pencil is my new best friend.
Whether or not you go bald while in chemotherapy treatment depends on the type of chemo you have. There are also individual responses to chemo, and some are quite odd: One of my nurses told me about a woman who lost only half of one eyebrow (in addition to the hair on her head). The other half of the brow stayed firmly in place.
The reason you lose your hair with conventional chemotherapy is that chemo attacks fast-growing cells, including cancer cells and hair follicles. Targeted therapies like Herceptin don’t cause hair loss because they work in a different way.
The photo is of me at about age 2 with my original hair: fine, strawberry blond, and straight as a stick.
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@ Jeanne Sather 2007.
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