On May 7th as promised, I was hooked up to an IV to receive
3450 mg of cyclophosphamide in an hour. It didn’t hurt or make me nauseous.
While the toxic liquid dripped into my veins, I ate a sandwich and yogurt and
chatted with Alex. But because I had no definitive answer on when I would start
to lose my hair, I surreptitiously tugged at the ends every ten minutes to see
if it was coming loose. I turned my head to check my shoulders to see if my
split-ends had fallen away. I checked the pillow for stray locks. But except
for the odd filament, my curly hair remained steadfastly attached to me and I
was never more attached to it.
Two weeks later, I still had
not lost any noticeable amount of hair. Then one morning I stood under a hot
shower and shampooed as usual. When I took my hands away from my head there
were strands of hair weaved between my fingers. It felt like I had put both
hands into a huge spider web. I pulled the hair off my hands and watched it
sail towards the drain. I conditioned and rinsed and twice more my fingers were
webbed with my hair. It completely filled the holes in the drain so that the
water started to back up forming a pond under my feet. I reached down and
scooped up the fibres. There was enough to fill one palm. I threw it across the
bathroom into the designer silver trash bin. It stuck to the side of the
plastic bag which kept the designer bin from getting dirty but hid the need to
have a designer bin. It looked like a tarantula. I held a moment of silence for
its passing. I got out of the shower and looked in the mirror expecting to see
a bald spot somewhere but I could not detect the difference. I gingerly combed my wet hair but when
strands rapidly filled the teeth I gulped and stopped combing.
There was no way
to stop it now. With each shower and each styling, my hair thinned so much that
when I looked in the mirror I saw my mother.
My transformation from the healthy, young-looking fit person I was a
year earlier was almost complete. I was sick, constipated, old and bald.
Three days later
we went on a motorcycle ride with friends to New Plymouth. I had paid for the
accommodation weeks earlier and was committed to the venture. The ride would be
about four and a half hours. When we stopped for lunch I took my helmet off. A
hundred hairs stayed behind, stuck to the cushioned black interior. Every time
I removed my helmet, I left a gift of my hair in cafes and service stations
along the route. When we got to the lodge in New Plymouth I showered and
instead of a few hundred hairs, the drain looked like a fat rat was sitting on
top of it. I didn’t say anything to Alex but after I dressed I blew my hair
dry. A round pile of hair blew away from my head past Alex like a small bird.
His eyebrows furrowed as he looked at the bird, now demised and laying on the
bed, then at me. I shrugged my shoulders and spoke quietly:
“My hair is
falling out”.
“Is it? I was
hoping you had bypassed that.”
“So was I.”
“I thought since
it hadn’t happened already it might not.”
“So did I.”
“I didn’t know
how long it would take to start falling out.”
“Me neither.”
We stood for a moment with the metre distance between us
feeling like a hundred. Neither of us knew what else to say. I took the bird
and buried it in the trash with the rest of the hair. I looked in the mirror
and fluffed what was still attached to my skull to make it look fuller before
we had to meet our friends for dinner. I was self-conscious all evening but I
held on until midnight before retiring.
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