Sunday, January 11, 2004
Chemo, Part Deux (or, Second Verse: Same as the First?)
I am in the middle of my second two-week cycle of chemo, and without any really ill effects. I am very fortunate, indeed. When I went to the oncologist's office last week it was very crowded. I was in the chemo room with two elderly gentlemen, one of whom arrived and departed in a wheelchair. The other was receiving some kind of medication that made him sleepy. While I was waiting for my session to be over, another older man stopped by to ask the nurse if he could get a prescription to receive hemoglobin because he was feeling quite terrible. My very biggest concern about dealing with illness, is that I was afraid that any treatment was going to make me feel unbearably awful, when I felt fine to begin with. Surgery was not fun, but it's a relatively short time later and I feel great. My chemotherapy is not drastic, and I don't have to worry about radiation at all. I'm very lucky.
I do wonder about my hair, though. Is it normal to have quite that many hairs on my pillowcase in the morning? When I spread hairstyling goop in my hair before blow drying, I have always ended up with hair stuck to my hands which I then roll into a wad and place on the corner of the sink to dispose of later, and I wonder if those wads are getting larger. Every time I pull a stray hair off of my clothing, I wonder if that's more than usual. It's normal for 50-100 hairs to come off of a human head every day; it's just part of the shedding process. What I would ordinarily pay little attention to or regard as a trivial annoyance is now a potential symptom or Harbinger of Things to Come.
I have sympathy I did not expect to ever have for guys my age who wonder the same thing about their own pillowcases and sinks o'hair. To anyone I've ever teased about thinning hair: you have my deeply felt, abject apologies.
I do wonder about my hair, though. Is it normal to have quite that many hairs on my pillowcase in the morning? When I spread hairstyling goop in my hair before blow drying, I have always ended up with hair stuck to my hands which I then roll into a wad and place on the corner of the sink to dispose of later, and I wonder if those wads are getting larger. Every time I pull a stray hair off of my clothing, I wonder if that's more than usual. It's normal for 50-100 hairs to come off of a human head every day; it's just part of the shedding process. What I would ordinarily pay little attention to or regard as a trivial annoyance is now a potential symptom or Harbinger of Things to Come.
I have sympathy I did not expect to ever have for guys my age who wonder the same thing about their own pillowcases and sinks o'hair. To anyone I've ever teased about thinning hair: you have my deeply felt, abject apologies.
