Getting to Week 5 -- Hair loss

I know it's been a long while since I posted and though I haven't been able to respond very well I appreciate all of your emails, texts and notes asking how I am doing.  I'm on day 2 of week 5 and somehow I hit a big dip in the road getting here.  The doctors assure me it's normal and warned me that radiation and chemo together is a tough regiment.

At the end of week 2 I started noticing my hair coming out in piles of 10 or 20 hairs, nothing alarming, but clearly something very different than regular brushing.  I started avoiding combing my hair and I was very hesitant in the shower to wash my hair well, hoping to prolong the process.  Every day more and more hair would come out in clumps and the clumps would get larger and larger until my trashcans were just full of hair.  My head has become very sore and raw and it hurts to touch it on the right side, let alone lay on it. Any accidental bump can send me to tears quickly.  Because my hair is long and I can't see the back of my head easily I couldn't clearly see what was happening in the mirror, only in the piles in my hands.  I am almost always around the kids and so I sort of kept it all in hiding to spare them from the process and to shield them from my grief.  As the days went on my hair became matted and took on the appearance of dread locks.   Paul would sit carefully and help me to separate the clumps to brush them out, but as soon as we would finish it would all clump up again.

One day right before Easter I was alone on my bed trying to comb my hair, making piles on my pillow when I figured out that the dead hair falling out was getting stuck in the living hair that was still growing and that is why it was matting.  It was a really powerful moment for me because I haven't been feeling much more than loss lately and I realized that what is dead just needs to be dead. I was holding on so tenderly to my hair because I didn't want to admit that it was going to come out and I was giving it so much attention and emotion.  I know in my head that it is vain and it is superficial and it is not a marker of my identity or my life, but it had been consuming me.  I was so struck but how much of that which is living and growing and healthy is caught up in things that are dead, that we hold on to, things that we grieve or long for that are not full of life.  And the dead things strangle the living things and make a giant mess, often stealing our attention and our joy.

I wish I was one of those strong people who really didn't care about the hair loss part.  I wish I was bold enough to walk around with half of my head bald but I'm just not.  Of course it was all so meaningful to me at that moment in time, doubly so, because I kept imagining the women at the tomb so distraught over death, unable to accept that death doesn't win, unable to feel God moving and living because they were so caught in their grief.

As I was siting and talking to my neighbor after school she encouraged me to acknowledge that there is a loss and that with loss there is sadness that surrounds it.  I do feel a loss, however silly and superficial it is and I'm still wrestling with that.

In my particular situation there is a great chance that my hair won't grow back.  Because of the high dose of radiation I am receiving and because it is directly on my scalp many people in my situation experience permanent hair loss.  If hair does grow back it will be in three to six months and so I'll just have to wait and see.  The good news is that I am able to pull my hair back into a pony tail and a bun and if I am careful you can't see any of the bald part of my head.  I'm hoping as the living hair continues to grow it will fill in around the dead spots and my hair will feel full again someday.

The kids, especially Noah, are a little scared of me when my hair is down, which hurts enormously, but they are fine when it is pulled back and so I am grateful that I have that option.