A Hair-Raising Tale

I'm going to let this be pretty much a photo entry, except occasionally, because I think the photos are powerful enough.  Let me start by saying that whenever you see movies about women with cancer, there is usually that moment, after starting chemotherapy, when they wake up and find a long golden lock of hair on their pillow. Well, it doesn't exactly happen that way.  

Yesterday, I noticed that Peach's hair looked "different." By "different," I meant that the consistency seemed different.  Not alive, really, if that makes sense.  That afternoon, she told me she was "shedding."  Her clothes looked like she'd just held a shedding dog in her lap.

This morning she got out of the shower and said that two clumps of hair had fallen out.  We knew it was time to take matters into her own hands.

Today, this day before Thanksgiving, we came to Kristie and Tom's house, where we would make preparations for tomorrow's Thanksgiving dinner.  Kristie would also shave Peach's head.

First she tried on some knit caps to wear afterwards.

The first picture was right after she had her hair cut at Mallard Place last week, the second is shortly after we arrived at Kristie's (notice how the hair has lost its "rich" look?) and the third was a few minutes later, after trying on some caps and discovering how much of her hair had come off when she removed the cap.

So Kris poured her some wine and started the process.

When it was over, Bob was there.

 

She chose a cap to wear

 

And the two of us shared a glass of wine.

 

Later, all the family got food ready for tomorrow, but that is a story for another day.  The deed is done and another indignity of cancer has taken place.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

My hair has always been my best feature.  As a child, to age about 7, I had Shirley Temple-type curls.  My mother would carefully form the curls around her finger each morning and, as she tells the story, during the day, the curls would tighten up so that in the morning it was a horrible ordeal to brush them out and re-curl them.

Finally, when I was 7, she agreed to let my hair be cut.  It was so painful for her that she couldn't stay in the beauty parlor and watch it be done.   When it was over, I had a nice short haircut.  The tight curls never came back, but my hair was always thick and wavy.

I came by my curly/wavy hair naturally.  My grandmother had very long hair, which she braided into a crown on top of her head, but when she finally had it cut, when she was probably close to the age I am now, it formed soft grey curls around her head.  I think my mother once told me that my grandfather (whom I only knew as bald) had curly hair when he was a young man.

Trying to get the curl back, my mother occasionally took me to a beauty parlor for a permanent, but the beautician told her I didn't really need one.   

My mother took over the care of my hair and always rolled it in curlers or pin curls and brushed it for me every morning before I went to school.  In fact, when I was going to enter the convent, after high school, my biggest fear of turning over my life to God, was that I would have to do my own hair for the first six months, before I got my headpiece--and I didn't know how.  This may have been the first clue that my dedication to the religious life was not entirely as deep as it should have been for someone who was about to enter a convent!

The thing about my hair that was always very nice was that whenever I went to a beauty shop to get it cut, whoever was working on my head always commented on what nice hair I had and sometimes called other beauticians to come over and see my nice, thick, wavy hair.  I had to put it in rollers or pin curls to get the look in this picture, but it curled nicely when I did.

(isn't that a cute picture of baby Jeri?)

When the kids went to nursery school, I was in my earth mother period.  I often went bra-less, I was literally barefoot and pregnant much of that time, and I decided to let my hair grow.  I didn't cut it for 3-4 years and it became this big bushy mass that was pretty much straight, and very difficult to get a brush through (and about impossible to get a comb through!)

It got to where it came to a couple of inches below my shoulders and really did not look very good (especially when I decided to give myself the auburn locks of Maureen O'Hara and tried coloring it.  Purple was not a good color for me...)

I finally gave up on the long hair and went and had it cut again.   Amazingly, suddenly it seemed that the curl came back.  Not the tight curls of my childhood, but definitely more curl than I had for years.  The beautician that I talked to said that often hair that had been curly once, when allowed to grow and let the weight pull all the curl out of it, when cut the curls would spring back again.

I don't know when I stopped setting my hair after washing it. I just had it cut.  To this day, I don't know what to tell a beautician when she asks me how I want my hair cut.   I would tell her to just cut xx inches off and my hair would do whatever it wanted.   It almost always looked good, some days better than others, but I haven't used rollers or curls in years (don't ask me how to use a hair dryer--I don't have a clue how to do it!)

My hair was so thick and curly that I got pulled out of a mall one day by a hoity toity stylist who had come to show beauticians how to cut naturally curly hair.  His model had not shown up and he asked if I would allow him to cut my hair.   It was, by far, the very best cut I ever had, even if he did spend the whole time talking about how ashamed I should be to go out in public looking the way I did and how disgusted he was at my appearance. (I had just run out for a quart of milk and had 5 children at home waiting for me!)

My mother, who was not born with curly hair, like a couple of her sisters, was aways jealous of my hair.  Almost every time she saw me she would grab my curly hair and say something like "LOOK at that hair.  God, it just makes me sick to look at it."  I understood that this was a backhanded compliment and that it made her sick because she wanted curly hair like I had, but I finally exploded at her one day and told her how it made me feel to have my mother always telling people how sick it made her to look at my hair.  Amazingly, that was one of my things that she actually remembered.  She hasn't mentioned my hair and how she felt about it since.

But something started happening a few years ago.  My hair started thinning.  It has been about 3 or 4 years now.  First I started noticing more hair than usual in the drain after a shower.  Beauticians stopped commenting about how wonderfully luxurious my hair was, and started asking if I wanted to buy "product" that would give my hair more body.  More body???  I had the hair that needed no body.  It had its own!

But as I look back over old photos and comparing with photos taken today, I have to admit that I definitely do not have the hair that I had before.

Not  this any more

...but this

I have to accept the fact that my thick, luxurious hair is not going to come back.  I'm still in pretty good shape, but as much as it got ho-hum tiresome to have people tell me what great hair I had...it would be nice to have that hair again.

At least I don't have to worry about my mother feeling sick when she looks at my hair.  Now it's me who does it!

iPad Hair

I knew the iPad would be a great toy for me, but I had no idea all the ways it would change my life.  I certainly never expected that it would have such an impact on my hair.

As I approach my 70th birthday, in 2 months, I have come to the realization that you expect parts of the body to slow down, but there are signs of aging that I never really expected.  For one thing, my typing speed has probably been cut in half, partly due to the numb fingers on my right hand that nobody seems to be able to do anything about and partly because though at one time I could type 135 words per minute with few-to-no errors, now I sometimes make 3 errors in one word, if it's a long word.   At first it was annoying, now I just accept it and am glad that I don't have a kind of condition (yet) which would prevent me from being  able to type at all.

Another aging thing that I have discovered over the years is that my hair has changed.  For so long, my haircuts at Supercuts always went the same way.   They'd ask how I want it cut, I'd give them some vague instruction and laugh that my hair always does what it wants to do anyway due to the wave in it, they start cutting and midway through the cut invariably the cutter comments on what nice, thick hair I have.

A few years ago, I began to wonder if I was losing my hair.  Oh, it didn't fall out in clumps, but there always seemed to be more hair in the drain after a shower than I remembered before and it seemed that the hair on top of my head was not as thick as it used to be.

At the same time, the cutters stopped telling me what great hair I had and last time someone actually asked me if I wanted some product that would give it more oomph.  

Who knew I'd been oomphless all these years?

The last few cuts didn't suit me either.  My hair was still doing what it wanted, but it wasn't what I wanted any more.  I seemed to be developing cowlicks where I'd never had them before.  Fortunately, I'm not particularly vain (for good reason), so I've just gone with however I can make it look OK so I can go out in public and not scare the horses.

But then I got the iPad.  I knew that I would love playing with an iPad, but I didn't realize how it could do about 80% of what I do on the desktop.   I can't write my journal on it because I use software that can't be installed.   And there are some other things that are better/easier to do on the desktop, but pretty much for all other intents and purposes, the iPad, especially now that it has a great keyboard, is my computer of choice.

It means that I can do all of the stuff I normally do on the desktop from the comfort of my recliner, instead of sitting on a hard chair at my desk.

At night, as I have often said, I start the sleep cycle on the couch in the living room, but wake up at some point and move to the recliner, where I finish out the night--or not, depending on whether my body has decided to have insomnia or not.

Because I know I will be waking up at the end of my sleep night in the recliner, I keep the iPad on the table next to the recliner.  It means that I can do all the normal things in the morning--check e-mail on both Google and my DCN account, check "That's My Answer," check Facebok and Twitter, see what the day's headlines are, etc., all with barely any perceptible movement on my part, so that dogs don't realize I'm awake and aren't immediatly there demanding food.

But THAT means that my head rests on the recliner for hours on end as I work on the iPad and by the time I get up, my hair has settled into a day's style that somewhat resembles Einstein's on a bad day.

It stands up, it flies off in odd directions, and the back looks like a rat's nest.  I try to smooth it down with water on a brush and that works until the hair dries and then it starts to creep off in its own direction again.

The only thing that really helps is to wash it, but that only lasts until I sit in the recliner with the iPad again and begin to work once more.

I truly never realized that iPad Hair would be a problem adding the new gadget to my life, but it certainly seems to be.  However, the trade-off in the convenience of being able to use the iPad in the warm family room while the dogs don't know I'm awake seems a reasonable one to make.

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We will be starting the new year with our friends from the old Davis Comic Opera Company, as we have done every year for the past five or six years.  We rarely see any of these people throughout the year, unless there is a funeral to attend, so  I am looking forward to having home made soup, maybe playing the name game, but mostly laughing and getting caught up.  At midnight we will have our champagne, kiss everybody, and head home, and probably be asleep by 12:30 a.m.

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Thanks again to Richard and Jennipurr for another year of Holidailies! I look forward to participating again next year!