“Don’t change a hair for me

Not if you care for me

Stay little valentine stay

Each day is Valentine’s Day.”

Lorenz Hart, lyrics

            I had no plans for Valentine’s Day, 2007, wasn't aware of the surprise headed my way. When I woke that Wednesday, my hair had gone every which way as I’d slept, more so than usual, and my scalp felt tender when I shampooed it. As I blow-dried my hair, a hank of it came out on my brush.

            Now I had the definitive answer to my questions about when the chemo would cause me to lose my hair—had my doctor meant after the second infusion or after the second round? Clearly, the former.

            I do not any longer believe in what the theologians call a three-storey universe, with God in heaven, people on earth, and devils in hell. But childhood training dies hard. I looked at the hair wound around the brush and took a deep breath, then looked up to the heavens and said, “Okay. Okay.”

            We were snowed in, which meant no friend could come to offer a literal shoulder. Instead, I sent an e-mail about my missing hair to one of them. Her response came swiftly. “Call the hairdresser and get it off. That’s what I’d do. . . not that you are asking. I just wouldn’t be able to handle the slow misery . . . and mess of the slower process. . . Tears for too long in this approach for me. But, it’s not about me. So . . . I send my deepest sympathy for you as you endure this process. I had a thought the other day that for you this would be like Lent, in that you are slowly having things taken away. I am praying that the richness of something like Easter awaits you!”

When I snowshoed out to the mailbox later in the day, I found a gift from that same friend: two chocolate bars, a gift certificate, and one of those small gift books put near the counters of bookstores to lure buyers, Pooped Puppies. The book featured photos of adorable sleeping pups with accompanying quotations chosen from people as different as Groucho Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. Some blessed soul had selected this: “Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.” The author was Etty Hillesum, who had not survived the Holocaust. I trust the person who compiled this work didn’t know a thing about her; certainly, the intent was not to trivialize Ms. Hillesum’s words. I meant no disrespect, either, but claimed those words for my day. They gave me perspective.

            Later in the day I was able to write, I am trying to be philosophical about this. There are 1,440 minutes in a day, and I am awake for just under 2/3 of them, say 900 of them. During one of them, hair came out on a brush. Do I need to ruin all the rest of the moments because of it? Some lovely things have happened already—chickadees have come to feed, and two friends have called.

            That morning’s loss was apparently simply a foretaste. I’d been afraid that losing my hair was going to be like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree dropping its needles all at once to the accompaniment of a light percussive sound. The next morning, no clumps of hair on my pillow greeted me, and none came off with the cap I had begun wearing just to keep warm on winter nights. I made an effort not to play with my hair as I usually did, hoping that perhaps I could baby it and keep it for another few weeks. I knew people who accepted their hair loss happily by regarding it as a sign that the chemo was working, but I was not consoled—after all, the hair loss simply indicated that the chemo was killing off healthy cells, not any lingering cancer cells.

            I wrote, My friend’s approach is sensible, but it is not mine. I have this fierce little wick of determination to live this experience and write it, not shortcircuit things. There may come a point when I change my mind, and I’m certainly not going to refuse helpful things like anti-nausea drugs. But just willy-nilly going bald is like Mary Poppins and her “Spit-spot, come along now.” No mess, no prolonged grief. She said too many tears in my approach. And that might be true, though I’ve still not cried. Deep breaths. . . . If I get it “over with,” jump to the deep end of the pool, will I miss some of the juice? I don’t know, and it’s as likely as not simply the perversion of my character—I’ve never outgrown an adolescent determination to do the opposite of what I’m told would be a sensible approach to life. It’s worked for me thus far, but I am aware that it may be one of the strategies that no longer serves me well.

            By Saturday, I had called my former stylist, a man who was great at short hair, for a shearing. I’d considered, and ultimately rejected, some sort of ritual headshearing, with women friends in attendance. It was a great idea, but I’d need to organize it and find or create the ritual, and I was fresh out of creativity. Nor did I feel like hosting a party about the hair loss.

            While getting ready that Saturday morning, I turned up the volume on my inner soundtrack, a mix of hymns, show tunes, and classical works I’ve sung in choirs. Later I wrote, I’m standing at the bathroom vanity, singing “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music as I lift major amounts of hair from my head. I haven’t watched the movie for some time, and it seems wildly inappropriate until I reach the line “and then I don’t feel so bad.” Am I sorry to lose my hair? Yes, most definitely. On the other hand, what I have now isn’t just dead, as all hair is, but “really most sincerely dead,” to switch musicals. The texture is different, headed toward straw, or like grass in August during a heat wave. The ends are like the burnt-out filament of an incandescent light bulb. So I will replace it with the wig or colorful hats.

            By the time I got to my stylist on the following Tuesday, there was much less hair to cut. He took it down to a buzz cut as gently as he could, taking more than a half hour to do what could have been accomplished in five minutes. After the cut, I put on my hat and went to the library. I browsed among the cancer section, finding a book that made me laugh for days, Bald in the Land of Big Hair, by breast cancer survivor Joni Rodgers, who lived in Texas when diagnosed.

            Before beginning the second round of treatment, I had another appointment with my doctor. He was getting used to my notebook, with its lists of questions and complaints, to which he listened and responded before examining me. I was trying to be amusing, although perhaps my delivery of complaints was a bit more dramatic than I’d intended. “I was first told I might have cancer on Friday the thirteenth. I had surgery just after Thanksgiving, and was diagnosed the week before Christmas. My hair started to come out on Valentine’s Day. What do you have planned for St. Patrick’s Day?”

            “Green beer!” the attending nurse said cheerfully.

            “I’m sorry about the timing of that,” he began. “But you’ve got to stop thinking like that. I don’t have anything planned—but I see you’ve planned red hair.”

            He didn’t understand the writer’s habit of imposing patterns, plot, and structure on life. However, any man who noticed my hair—albeit synthetic and purchased—could be forgiven much.

            I went on to detail my reactions to the first round of chemo: the shrill sounds in my ear (he told me to track that), belching (it’s annoying, not life-threatening, he said), the charley horses in my leg (fearing blockage, he made me promise call me if my foot started to swell), a manic phase (yes, that’s common), and pain in my gut.

            “What kind of pain?” he asked.

            “I’ve had forty years of good health. I don’t know how to describe it.”

            “Ah, you’ll like this,” he said, brightening as he appealed to the writer in me. “Pain has character: it’s hot or it’s cold, dull or sharp, constant or intermittent.”

            I still struggled with how to describe this particular pain’s character—which was perhaps hot, dull, and intermittent—but at least now I had a link from this alien world of medicine to my own world of words. I was also glad to learn that my CA 125 (a tumor marker gauged by regular blood draws) was down from 96 to 31, within normal range. I may have lost my hair, but any stray cancer cells were also responding to the chemo.