Hair and the Dog(s)

Okay, no more brave, little, wistful, stoic sufferer. I HATE the hair thing. I am so ugly. I am falling to pieces, everything hurts: my chest, my head, my scalp, my hair follicles, my armpits, my shoulders, my neck. Hair is everywhere. I am shedding more than my black lab, my border collie mutt and my friends' two golden retrievers combined. They told me that one day I would wake up bald, end of story. They didn't tell me that I would have to personally remove each hair from my head. I am beginning to appreciate what a full head of hair I used to have. I must have had about gazillion pieces. Now they number in the thousands. Thousands of hairs don't look like much. It's nothing like thousands of dollars, for example. Thousands of hairs is mostly bald. It's worse than bald. It's like I have skinny, little, glass needles sticking out of my head that with any pressure snap off with tiny splintering burns. It's revolting.

Remember the blog post where I was raving about the dignity and charisma of bald headed people...

Guess we need to reconsider...

Then there are the smells. Everything smells disgusting, including me. My shampoo (yes, even a thousand hairs could use a little shampoo), my skin lotion, my pee, my clothes, everything smells ghastly. I'm telling you it is just like morning sickness. This whole thing is like a sadistically distorted version of pregnancy. The queasiness, the hypersensitivity to tastes and smells. Even the chest pain sometimes feels like the tingle of breast milk "letting down". I mean how cruel is that?! Breast cancer, which is pretty much the opposite of fertility, birth, and new life, is an experience that most resembles pregnancy for me. Perhaps it isn't breast cancer so much as chemotherapy. When you think about it, I have no idea what breast cancer is like. Let's hope I never find out.

Well, thank you. It feels good to rant a bit. I'm sorry I haven't written for a while. As I've mentioned, having cancer is very time consuming. Last week, after feeling a bit yucky for a couple of days, my husband and I went to Martha's Vineyard to work on estate stuff related to the recent deaths of his parents. (As I've also mentioned, he's had a sensational year losing two parents, an aunt and an uncle, completing the annihilation  of that entire generation of his family.) So to break up the week of cancer blues, we thought we'd take a happy jaunt to the Vineyard to deal with death. It wasn't too bad really. We had the dogs. Everything is better with dogs.