It’s an odd thing to run around the house moments before you leave frazzled because you can’t find your hair; only to remember you left it in the glove compartment box of your car! What happened to the good ol’ days when I used to misplace my car keys?
Losing my hair for the second time during what I call “Chemotherapy Part Duex – The Transplant”, was surprisingly just as easy for me as it was the first time in 2008; it’s my memory now fogged by chemo that I miss the most! Why would my wig be scrunched into a hairy ball next to my insurance and identification papers in the glove compartment box? Well it’s a long story, but I will say this – thank god I didn’t get pulled over and asked for my papers, and it’s becoming common for me to flip my wig in favour of a going bald these days.
When a young woman first loses her hair during treatment her first inclination is to run out and buy a pricy wig to replace it. Heaven help her if she buys a real hair wig, those hairy monsters are hot! Most of us buy a synthetic wig that looked alot like our old hair, and then do all kinds of funny things with it like take pictures of the cat in it and email it to our friends (or is that just me?) - well everything but wear it!
I think in the beginning there is this big fear of losing your identity when your head hair becomes temporarily “disabled” (aka bald). But then something happens during treatment, you get too tired to bother with it one day and you leave the house without it and lo and behold your identity still came with you!
When I lost my long red hair the first time I did my best to embrace it. I had a big party, shaved my head in front of a big crowd and donated the hair to Locks for Love. I felt so good about giving up my hair to help someone else. But as the months passed and I watched my eyebrows, eye lashes, arm hair and even nose hair go I would panic at the alien looking back at me in the mirror, I could no longer see I what I thought was my identity.
When I lost my hair the second time I thought it would be harder, like a visual set back that said the cancer is not gone. But as the treatment got started again I almost couldn’t wait to shave my head! I needed to see that bald head as a visual reminder that it was time to reach within and pull out the true characteristics of my identity, those that make me a lean, mean, cancer fightin machine... having a mop of red hair or cute wig was not on the “things you must have to fight cancer” list. Which got me thinking about the absurdity of ever letting hair be on my identity list in the first place.
It takes an experience like cancer to show you that you can’t see your identity, only the stuff you put on top of it. These days I often feel that’s what a wig is, just something I put on top of my identity and I think why bother... so I shove it in the glove compartment box with all my other paid for identities that don’t really identify me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I'm sorry if I giggled as I read the first few paragraphs. It made me remember the time when my sister lost her Forever Young wigs. She scoured every inch of the house for five long hours, but she still failed. So she just borrowed our mother's synthetic wigs for a week. You know what, it turned out that her wigs were in her car's compartment! Oh, I miss that silly sister of mine.
ReplyDelete