Talking hair. Slow, slow, S L O W!

 Hair....oh my goodness, my hair!

Chemo, a chemically induced menopause, and my hair has never recovered.

August 2018, and I was finishing my last cycle of chemotherapy.

I was wiped out, emotional and my veins had just about given up , after six sessions of toxic intravenous chemicals being pumped in.

It took four attempts and three nurses to find a viable vein, and it was pretty traumatic.

But the plus side was that my hair had started to grow back , and I had a faint fuzzy white covering under my headscarf.

I couldn't stop touching it!

After the initial shock of the new hair being white, it grew steadily over the next few months, a mix of white and grey fuzz.

Gradually it developed a fuzzy kink to it and the grey became interspersed with brown, a coarse texture, but it was growing!

Fast forward a year, and, although quite thick, it was growing upwards and outwards, like Worzel Gummidge, but not doing very much lengthwise.

I also had a bit of a bald patch and a combover on my crown, which took another year to fill in.

While on tamoxifen my hair stayed quite thick, albeit coarse.

However, when I switched to exemestane it began to thin.

A combination of exemestane and a chemo induced menopause, and I'm mourning my pre cancer hair.

The texture has finally returned to normal and lost the coarseness and kink, but it's much thinner than it was, and growth is painfully slow.

At more than four years out of chemo, and exemestane still ongoing, I've given up on ever being able to rock a shiny bob again.

As a woman, our hair is so important.

A bad hair day can negatively affect emotions, and I have a lot of bad hair days!

When it fell out during chemo, the anxiety that it wouldn't grow back was real.

But I wasn't prepared for the change in texture, the thinning, the S L O W growth over the next few years.

Bald was definitely easier to deal with than the hair I have now.

Contemplating going uber short.

 Winter blues and the hope of Spring.

I have really struggled with winter this year.

I'm not sure if it gets harder to deal with the older I get, or it's a build up of many things, but January seemed to go on forever!

The low light levels, dark at 5pm, grey skies and drizzle, interspersed with hard frost and wind.

My mental health definitely suffered this winter.

I've been unmotivated, anxious and distinctly lacking in oomph.

Insomnia is my nemesis.

Insomnia that seemed to ramp in those dark nights, while nocturnal Lily-the-cat was wandering around outside, oblivious/deliberately ignoring me calling her, whilst I also wandered around outside, dressed in pyjamas and a big hat and setting off various light sensors as I searched for her in the village!

2022 was a tricky year for selling, and the cost of living was - and still is - spiralling.

My ongoing battle with exemestane isn't helping either.

What is it with this single solitary pill that causes such awful side effects?

Each one on its own is probably not too bad, but all thrown in together is hard to deal with.

Five years on from my breast cancer diagnosis and I'm probably skipping more than I'm taking now.

 I've found the lack of support from the oncologist post treatment quite shocking really.

Impossible to get an appointment with and my lovely but unhelpful breast care nurse on the other end of the phone, just reiterating that I need to take it for a decade!

Sometimes, I wonder if tamoxifen was the lesser of three evils.

At the crux of it all is being immediately thrown into a chemical menopause with chemo and the exemestane just ramping up the side effects with a vengeance.

Perhaps male oncologists just don't appreciate the severity of menopause symptoms?

BUT, here we are, nearing the end of February.

The days are longer, the daffodils are nearly out and my windowsills have become plant nurseries.

The insomnia is still rampant, the low level anxiety ever present, but my mood has lifted.

Lily the wanderer is staying inside more at night, and the windows are firmly closed.

Sometimes, it's the small things that can make all the difference.

I had a long overdue lightbulb moment that maybe I wasn't motivated workwise in winter because my north facing workroom barely caught the sun.

Impossible to move my large desktop computer, and there's no way around moving my sewing station, but having a new, shiny, present to me laptop in the sunny, south facing front room has made a huge difference this month!

I had originally replaced my old laptop with a desktop to do precisely what I'm not doing now - keeping work behind one door - but, for now, this is working for me.