The Merits of the Case

Despite the angst apparent in my last post, this has been a pretty good week for me. I never experienced the crash that I did after the first two treatments, so I felt better and better with each passing day. I actually went shopping with my mother-in-law today, and although I’m absolutely exhausted now it was good to do something not related to school or medical treatments.

I am feeling much better about all of this than I was the other day. Thank you all so much for your love and support and kind comments at a time when I really needed it. I debated about whether or not to post about such a low point, but I have them and they are as much as part of this as the high points. I wrote another post about my concerns about my appearance during that same time this past week and I have posted it below as a record of my thoughts even though I am feeling much better about that, too.

On Friday morning I saw my radiation oncologist because the skin above my radiation site has been getting more and more irritated and red over the past couple of weeks. He was concerned about it…and with good reason. It had become a wound that resembled a pretty severe burn. I left his office with all kinds of things for dressing a second degree burn and I am now back to caring for the site again to try to promote healing. He thinks that the chemotherapy has retarded the healing and that the skin cells that were damaged from the radiation are just now starting to react to the chemotherapy. I have to continue to care for the spot for another week and then go back to see him to make sure that it’s starting to heal. This is occurring because I had the radiation before the chemotherapy, and I’m not sure they have seen this precise reaction in Mammocite patients in this particular office before. They kept telling me that every situation is different.

I ended up giving an impromptu scarf tying demonstration in the radiation oncologist’s waiting room before my appointment. I never thought my mad scarf tying skillz developed as a Limited co-manager in the ‘80s would come in so handy. I was sitting in the waiting room reading Con Law when an elderly woman around 80 or so came out of an exam room and started chatting with the receptionist. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall and wore a bright red shirt, white capris, and a bright red bandana on her head. I was half-listening to their conversation and admiring the older woman’s spunk, when she suddenly turned toward me and started to briskly cross the waiting room to where I was sitting. As she walked, she said, “Excuse me, can I ask you how you tied your head covering?”

I was wearing a beautiful new silk scarf that I found at Filene’s Basement in the city last week and I had it tied in the back with the long tails hanging down my back. I was happy to share my “technique” with her and in order to best demonstrate how to tie it I took it off and unfolded it so that she could see how big it was. The scarf is a large square which I fold into a triangle and then simply tie like a bandana behind my head. I showed her how to fold it and then put it on my head and turned my back to her so that she could watch me tie it. Suddenly I felt her hand on top of my head, pressing down on the scarf. Because it was silk, she was afraid that it would slip off my head and she was trying to help me keep it in place.

As this was going on, two other women approached us in the waiting room. Both of these women were in their 50s or 60s, and neither of them wore any head covering on their bald heads. One woman had a small amount of thin wispy gray hair and the other had very short gray hair. It quickly became apparent that all three of these women knew each other. They walked toward us and the woman with her hand on my head told them that I was showing her how to tie a scarf.

As they discussed various scarf styles, I found myself stuck. I couldn’t go any further in my scarf tying because the woman’s hand was still pressed firmly onto the top of my head and the scarf was stuck, but I couldn’t ask her to move her hand because she was in the middle of explaining why she needed to know how to do this. I sat on the couch with my back to her with my elbows in the air and my arms behind my head, holding the ends of my scarf together as I waited for her to take a breath so that I could ask her if she would please move her hand.

The other two women then began to ask me about my hair loss and told me about theirs. Both of them told me that they had decided to forego all head coverings and just to be bald. One of them said that she had decided early in her chemotherapy treatments that this was her now and that she would wear it proudly. The other told me that one day she woke up and decided she was tired of messing with head coverings and that she would just not wear anything anymore. They were incredibly inspirational and seemed so relaxed and comfortable with their lack of hair. Being bald didn’t seem to bother them at all. I needed to run into those women yesterday and it’s interesting how providence seemed to put them in my path when I needed them most.

I came home from my appointment yesterday and took off my scarf and spent the rest of the day at home just being bald. It was liberating and so much more comfortable than messing with a scarf or hat. I haven’t left the house with my head bare yet, but I’m getting there.