Wait and See

Hey everyone - sorry it has been so long since my last post but I am finally feeling a little better and closer to my normal self (well as normal as that ever was.)

I have been trying to keep myself busy during the days with a variety of projects, none of which seem to be cleaning the house or unloading the dishwasher (much to B's dismay... just kidding honey) The most recent project I have picked up is an old scrapbook that I started, oh about four years ago, and have rekindled my romance with scrapbooking.  Apparently this project trumps the two needlepoint projects that I currently have going on, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the hats I need to make for the hospital or the page full of thank you notes I need to write -- so to all of you who sent me a heartfelt gift for my birthday, I promise your thank you note is coming and I LOVED everything!!

Besides piling crafting projects on myself, I have also been working at trying to get my head down to totally bald - as I mentioned in my last post, I thought it was imminent - now it is pretty much a reality.  I have recently learned a few things about being bald and hair loss:

1. it isn't as easy to lose hair, when it is super short - I have since come up with a solution (that is to come later)

2. a smooth head seems to stick to everything.  Just yesterday I was laying on the couch with what I like to think are my softly lotioned hands, and low and behold - my hands STUCK to my head.  How many lucky people can say that?!

3. your head really is a huge heat conductor - it was 70-something degrees and I was walking around the house with a cashmere beanie on.

As I have been trying to enjoy the weather, I have also been trying to not burn more superwhite scalp to a crisp. I never knew how fairskinned I really was - I mean it is astonishing. Thank god I tan easily or I could give Nicole Kidman a run for her money...  I mean people say fair skin is back in, but I think two-tone is the next thing, tan face and white scalp is really the look of the future.  

According to my mother, I have never been this bald, EVER, not even when I was a baby - so needless to say, it has been an interesting experience for all those involved. SO as I mentioned in bald-point-number-one, getting to this almost bald status has been challenging to say the least.  I was really hoping for a mass exodus that would leave me Doctor-Evil bald but instead we have had to use some interesting means to get there.  I have certain spots on my head that felt out entirely, I have some that seem to be holding on for some reason and then I have others that needed a little assistance. So M and B decided to give a lintroller a twirl - that's right, the same contraption you use to gather up errant pet hair. Miraculously it works! So to rid myself of Dalmatian spots and to achieve total smoothness, I have been lintrolling my head to nab those pesky spots. Below are a couple of photos, the first was last week and since then I am a bit more smooth :) 

My eyebrows will be falling out shortly, but I am prolonging their demise for as long as I can AND thanks to Latisse, my eyelashes seem to be holding strong. I am going to continue using it through transplant and see how it works.

So, this is a status update on me - the next thing I really have to do is go in on May 3 for my PET Scan and a battery of other tests over at Dana Farber.  As I mentioned before, please please think positive thoughts for CR and keep me in your prayers.

Enjoy your weekends everyone! 

Be Careful What You Wish For

To hell with anticipation.

It's funny how when you wish for something, you think you really want it to happen - but when it does, it hits you like a stack of bricks...

I was quoted last week saying "if my hair is going to fall out, I wish it would just go ahead and come out so I don't have to wonder when or how much..." Ahhh if only I could turn back the hands of time.

Let me start from the beginning - rewind to treatment last Tuesday: B and I are sitting at the clinic and I ran my hands through my then long and flowing hair and my fingers came back with a few stray hairs - nothing unusual right? WRONG. This was only the beginning. Wednesday rolls around and after two days of abusing the ponytail, it was time to wash, dry and style my hair that I have patiently grown after donating 13 inches to Locks of Love. A few brush-fulls and a bit of anxiety later, this exercise in usual grooming proved to be a bit more stressful.  It was official - the damn red drug, Adriamycin, had done its job, I was indeed losing my hair far quicker than anyone had expected.

In efforts to control this situation, I immediately called my hairdresser to cut my hair short thinking that shortening the length would all of a sudden thwart Project Fallout. All day Thursday I kept having to remind myself that the presence or length of my hair didn't define me, but I kept finding myself in this awkward mental position that I was allowing myself to feel crappy about something that, in the grand scheme of things, is so small. Come 10 a.m. Friday morning, I was sitting at my salon saying farewell to seven or more inches and walked out with a super cute bob.

Fast forward 30 hours and I experienced likely the most traumatic shower of my entire life as I was confronted with massive hair loss and as you girls can imagine - lots and lots of tears. After attempting to style my once-cute bob, I decided that B and I would spend our Saturday night shaving my head and drinking lots of champagne.

Now after all the emotion of losing my hair, it was time for a little fun - enter: B's Salon of Style and a $15.99 set of ConAir clippers. We turned on the Sinatra, drank quite a few glasses of champagne and went through a variety of really classy haircuts like a hackneyed layering job, a mullet, a partial fade and two different lengths of a GI Jane-style buzz.

We settled on the buzz cut that continues to shed but, hey, looking on the bright side, if the drugs are wreaking this kind of havoc on my hair, I shutter to think what it's doing to the tumor. Below you will find a few pictures for your viewing pleasure.

xoxo

T