HAIR!

Barnet Fair!

Tony Blair!

Rug!

Ickie!

Tif!

Whatever slang name a gal (or guy for that matter) has for their crowning glory, the prospect of losing it all for several months is one of the most distressing and poignant aspects of having chemotherapy.

My sister was no exception.   She is a hairdresser.  She knows hair inside out – literally – from the chains of amino acid chains which make the hair proteins,  to the best conditioner to make it shiny.

She scared my parents by coming home with whacky zebra striped hair in her late teens. In her early to mid twenties she worked for two of the most gorgeous transvestites in West London (you’d never know) and became very accomplished in BIG hair – BIG, BIG hair – for their stage acts.  Late twenties she grew dreadlocks - thick, smelly and down past her shoulders – I say ‘grew’ but there is not much talent as far as I can see, in growing dreadlocks.  Don’t you just leave the hair be and suffer the itchies?  The dreads were hacked off (and kept in a box – STILL) during her pregnancy with Maisie and she grew an almost ordinary bob.  When Maisie was born, she went all elfin and bleached her number 2 bright white.  She worked part time for two lovely Greek brothers and was introduced to the shampoo and sets brigade.

Then she moved to Cornwall and developed a bit of surf chick style, growing her hair long and straight with sun kissed streaks in the front.  How they became sun kissed during the winter months, I will not divulge completely except to tell you that it involved a swim cap with holes in it, a crochet hook and a bottle of thick white liquid.   I’m not going to tell tales but most ladies, (and more men than would care to admit) will know what I am talking about!

Just when she had perfected ‘the toss’ and could attract a ‘dude’ at fifty paces with a flick of her locks, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“My hair!  I love my hair!”  She mourned it’s loss as soon as she knew.  She mourned it more than her breast I think. 

           “You might not even loose your hair, Ange.  You might not need chemo.”  We rallied but Angela knew she would have to have chemo and that the world of the follicular challenged was something she would know in the coming months.

We read up about hair loss through chemotherapy and talked to ‘everyone’ who had had experience or knew someone who had lost their hair that way.  Several mentioned a treatment called the ‘cold cap’.  The breast care nurses had refered to it before but Angela had dismissed it when she was informed that it could add another hour or two on a chemotherapy session and that it was very uncomformabtle.

As the chemotherapy approached and hair loss was a reality, we looked into the Cold Cap once more.   It works by cooling the cells of the hair root and restricting the flow of blood to them so these cells are less likely to be affected by the toxic drugs.  Cooling ones ‘barnet’ to ‘ice cream headache’ coldness – could she put up with that?  How about the extra time before and after the chemotherapy treatment?

Angela wasn’t convinced.  She liked heat. Cold was good as mint choc chip ice cream or ice cubes in a glass of Baileys.  Cold was not good as a head accessory.  Then there was the issue of it actually working.  Most cases showed a thinning of hair in any case. 

“I can’t do thinning hair.  What if I sit all thought that and my hair goes thin and patchy anyway?”  Angela debated with herself as much as with us. “I’ll end up with a comb over.”

She decided not to go with the cold cap and went on-line to buy another scarf. 

I though it was amazing that a cold cap had ever been invented and put into practice.  Photographs showed it to be like something a crash test dummy would sport.  Then I thought, if it can be used on the head, why can’t a bag of frozen peas placed over the eyelids, have the same effect for eyelash alopecia?  And the eyebrows come for that matter! 

Eh? 

I put it to Angela.

“If you think I am going to lay with a bag of Bird’s Eye peas taped to my face while they pump me full of poison …  I don’t even like peas!”  

She didn’t see the funny side.  Not even when I suggested using sweet corn kernels if she had a bit of an issue with the vegetable in question.

I mentioned it to the nurse administering Angela’s chemo around the third cycle.  She almost knocked the cannula out of Angelas arm when she fell off her stool laughing.  Once she had sobered up a bit (important for a nurse) she agreed that in theory it was a great idea.   Angela still sniffed at the thought!

So no cold cap and no peas, but mark my words here and now, there WILL be a eye mask version of the cold cap, manufactured in the future and I hope you will all inform those clever manufacturers, where the idea was first conceived.