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.
