mebald

Hair loss, a gain?

 

I am not my hair, although for most of my life I thought I was, There's something about being a redhead that makes you special...or think you are....a minority of raging color. It became my trademark, my identity.

As a toddler, "beautiful," "red" and "hair," were starting vocabulary. In the second grade I realized that only one other boy in my school had red hair. His was carotty. Mine was richly auburn. I never considered him a threat.

No one else in my family had red hair. The ring around my father's ears was black, then gray. My brother's was brown before his distilled into a similar ring. My mother's showed a glint of red in the sun, but officially could never be construed as anything other than black. I was unique, and it was obvious.

The red hair caught the eye of the man I married. Why wouldn't it? He was a hairdresser. Red stands out among raven, flaxen, mousy and other trite colors. Under his tender loving care my heretofore subdued fantasies about glamor started to surface. Sometimes he fashioned it long and undulating, a sensuous frame that seemed to improve my face. Sometimes it was pixie short, flaunting the power of the minimal: Leave them wanting more.

Now I'm the one who wants more. Chemo took my hair away. The experience can be invaluable.

The camouflage is gone. It's just me. More naked than naked when you consider losing hair from chemo doesn't just mean from your head....pubic, underarm, leg hair and often, eyebrows go, too. The good news is that eyes and expression are more evident. The bad news is so are flacid areas, age spots, scars and wrinkles.

It's a mini exercise in feeling what it's like to have a "disability" and learning to live with it without depressing yourself or your friends. You learn to monitor your comportment more. You try to make light: "Help—I'm having a no hair day!"

Of course men live with baldness all the time. But they get to adjust to it more gradually. With chemo, it happens pretty much in a week. The doctor predicted it would start coming out two to three weeks after the first treatment, and I was right on schedule. A comb drawn through turned fuzzy with hair that came along for the ride. It didn't hurt. It just came out, roots weakened by the attack of the chemicals against fast-reproducing cells. On the scale of inconveniences, encroaching baldness was equalled only by messiness. Cleanup entailed floors, necklines, anything within fallout range. It was a relief the evening I decided to shave it all off.

I speculated that when it grows back, I would be forced to see what color my hair really is, at least for the first half inch or so. Will I like this new-found reality? Will I reject it, as during the 10-15 years my hair has needed help being red? Does it matter?

Hair is truly one of life's gray areas.

Postscript: After chemo I waited for my hair to grow back.

I waited and waited...and waited... ...and waited.

It never did. And it never will. Chemo had exacerbated a genetic tendency toward baldness obvious in the males in my family.

Now that I've had a chance to adjust, I don't mind not having hair. It saves a lot on maintenance. No mess. No bother. Just buy a wig every year. Or go naked into the night (and day) as I do at gym. Wigs are just too da#^ed hot to wear when exercising vigorously. It took a while to reach this decision, but now that I've been doing this almost a decade, you see that it is not upsetting others. Au contraire – a fellow woman bald from alopecia is in a lot of my classes. We joke that we must have the same hairdresser.

 

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