Persis Khambatta I am not!

The last vestiges of hair are pretty much gone now and any hopes I might have had for a good bald look vanished along with it all. It is so weird being so hairless (and I mean just about everywhere!) somehow I feel like my identity went down the plug hole with all the hair! At the moment I am just happy to still have a reasonable amount of eyebrows and lashes, although I expect they'll be gone soon as well. At least I do have a new wig to play with, although I have realised that I need a trip to the hairdresser to get it to look better, but that's a minor thing.

I am definitely finding the whole identity thing hard to deal with today, it's like I woke up not feeling like me and that's scary. I watched a repeat of How To Look Good Naked this morning which featured a woman who has been through the same thing and was in tears at the end when she came out wearing a bikini. It made me realise what I've lost but it also gave me some hope too, although sadly my scars are much worse than hers as mine goes right out under my arm and around the side of my chest. Plus don't get me started on the fact that for radiation treatment I will need to have lots of tattooed dots all over my chest wall from the clavicle downwards!

OH and I have discussed having a holiday at the end of next summer when I will hopefully have finished treatment and as I love swimming I badly want to be able to wear something other than T shirts but all the swimwear in the post surgery ranges look like they are designed with the 65+ market in mind. I keep wondering how am I ever going to feel feminine again! You only have to look through my undies drawer to see how hard that's going to be and it could be more than a year before I can even think about a recon, let alone see someone about it!

I really want to be able to dance again but I'm at a loss as where to begin when it comes to costuming and I really do need to have a proper goal when it comes to getting back on stage, because if I can't do that I'll be heartbroken. I guess today it all seems to be so far away, like a fantasy that will never quite come true.

I know all this seems like madness to worry about right now just when I should be more concerned about getting through the treatment, but part of it is also about telling myself that I do have a future and that I should plan for it now, so that I have goals and something to look forward too.

Bye Bye Hair!

Today is the day that my hair fell out - rather spectacularly! Some people find that their hair falls out gradually others end up like me, it pretty much all falls out over the space of a few hours.

I woke up in the early hours with an aching head and realised that it was in fact the outside of my head that was hurting at which point I knew that major hairloss was on its way. However much you mentally prepare for it by reading advice leaflets, listening to other people's experiences when it finally happens it comes as a shock. I was washing my hair and as I did so I realised that most of it was either in my hands or in the bath. Huge handfuls of it leaving me with sore bare patches on my head. At first all I could do was look at it in disbelief, surely that couldn't possibly be my hair? Sadly of course that's exactly what it was and the more I ran my hands through it the more it came out so there was only one thing left to do - get rid of it all.

My husband is a dab hand with the clippers as he cuts his own hair, so over the course of an hour we cut and clippered away what was left. I guess you could say that a neat job was made of it but there is no way that I am going to say that I like it! It reinforces everything I've been saying to those around me - short hair doesn't suit me. Nope, it makes me look old and it screams out 'cancer patient' louder than anything else can. I know it will grow back but that doesn't help deal with the now.

I feel mixture of things - hatred of cancer and what it is doing to me on the inside, hatred of chemotherapy and what it is doing to me both mentally as well as physically but a little voice (and tonight it really is a little voice) is also saying that if my hair is falling out maybe that's a sign that the chemotherapy is actually doing its job. . .

I have week to go to my second course of AC and the thoughts of having to go through the whole sickness, oral mucositis crap is horrible but what are the alternatives? All I can say right now is that I've managed to survive cycle #1 which means that there are only 7 left to get through.

Through a Mirror Darkly

The last couple of days have been dark ones as I try to come to terms with the side effects, both physically and emotionally, of the chemotherapy. In some ways the emotional ones have give me far more problems than the physical ones.

Whilst I was prepared for the nausea and the tiredness, I wasn’t prepared for the more subtle effects like the drastic change in my taste buds, the development of a highly sensitive gag reflex and the large numbers of mouth ulcers that make it difficult to talk, eat and sleep. I was told that not everyone gets the same set of side effects, not everyone gets all of them and that it can affect people in a very individual manner – they weren’t kidding!

But to be honest the worse thing has been the emotional side of it all; the sudden bouts of deep depression, the feeling that this is all too horrible to bear and the episodes where all I want to do is cry. Not gentle crying either but deep racking sobs that seem to tear themselves out of my body no matter how hard I try to hold them in. They are born out of a despair at facing several months of all the crappy side effects but they are also a sudden deep-seated anguish at the possibility of a life cut short before I’ve done all the things I wish to do. It’s a kind of grief I have never experienced before, not even on the deaths of a deeply beloved father and grandmother twenty months ago. It’s the recognition that I have cancer, a serious kind of cancer, which will hover in the background of my life and thoughts permanently from now on.

No one is ever cured of this type of cancer, you simply do what must be done and count each year at time, in the hope that every time you go for a check up the doctor will tell you that there is ‘no evidence of disease.’ Invasive breast cancer in one breast leaves you much more vulnerable to a new primary diagnosis in the other breast. Its cells are also more pernicious and sneaky; they will often pop up in other parts of your body, so life becomes an almost continual round of checks and examinations to catch the little bastards as soon as they start causing trouble.

I think the enormity of a life coloured by this knowledge has finally started to sink in and of course it is all deeply frightening. I find myself wondering how exactly I am going to cope with all of that and I also worry about how it is going to affect those around me. Particularly my husband who is of course deeply distressed by the whole thing; it’s awful for him to lie in bed at night listening to me sob my heart out and feeling powerless to do anything about it. A nightmare for both us and I thank my lucky stars that we have a strong, enduring love for each other that will hopefully see us through those really dark and difficult moments.

I want to smash this dark mirror or shine a bright light upon it in a bid to dispel the black thoughts but at the moment I just can’t quite bring myself to do so. I hope that I can find the courage to do one or the other soon. . .