Put a wig on it

The urban turban. Great for pre-baldness shedding.

As soon as I started telling people I had Lymphoma (I was still feeling weird about saying ‘cancer’. I think in my head it was different if it was Lymphoma; it wasn’t really cancer), they would ask me if I was going to lose my hair during chemo, and then, often quite authoritatively, they would tell me to get a wig.

"You MUST get a wig", I was advised. "So that if you ever want to go out and at least LOOK normal, you at least have the option.'

Now, I had seen plenty of cancer patients at the RMH day oncology centre already by this point, and many of the women wore wigs, and I have to say, most of them did not look 'normal'. The beautiful, highly convincing, 'is it/isn't it' Beyonce-class wig was a rarity. More common was a humbler version - I mean, these things are expensive - that could be picked a mile away. Some looked pretty good, some looked sad and exhausted. Wigs have to be maintained, like real human hair. I've never been a big fan of hair grooming; I didn't necessarily trust myself to keep a wig in pristine condition.

I have had three aunts go through chemotherapy for breast cancer (I have a big family). They all lost their hair during treatment, and wore wigs and beanies to cover up their heads. I spoke to them about what to do, and they agreed that it was good to have a wig, even just for back up.  All three aunts were, incidentally, teachers - so being in front of a class of teenagers all day they were motivated to get organised and take care of their wigs. Some students never knew they were going through chemo.  My aunt Barb was particularly expert on her acrylic wig, and many people thought it was actually a particularly fetching new haircut. It was the right option for her, right up until she opened a hot oven with her wig on, and frizzled the fringe. Luckily this was well after treatment had finished, and her hair had pretty much grown back.

So to wig, or not to wig? That was the question I pondered as I wandered around my beloved suburb of Brunswick, where a sizeable proportion of the population could be considered cosmopolitan and/or flamboyantly dressed.  The local hipsters seem to dress from the op shops, $2 shops and the studios of their experimental fashion designer mates.  Around the time I was considering the wig option, I was in the local Safeway and saw a young man in a hand-knitted full-body balaclava and dyed pink hair.  There are already a lot of wigs in Brunswick too - there's one ancient, heavily made up lady I see regularly sitting in McDonalds nursing a single filter coffee.  She has fully teased her platinum blonde bob wig so it stands 30cm from her head.  It takes a lot to stop traffic in Brunswick. I wasn’t sure that going out on the street as a completely bald 36 year old woman would really cause much of a stir. And of course being a very multicultural suburb, a headscarf in Brunswick is not remarkable in the slightest.

The 'transition pixie cut' before my complete
buzz cut.

I had been terrified that Koen would find my baldness disturbing
but most of the time he thought it was funny. Such a relief.

My hair was quite long, augmented of course by the wonders of pregnancy.  To get the kids used to the idea of mummy changing her hair, before I had even started chemo, I had had my hair cut into a bob.  Never mind what is tolerated on the streets of Brunswick; I didn’t really want to suddenly appear at home looking like Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3 (side note: she was paid $4 million to shave her head for that role, apparently). 

A couple of weeks after that first, dreadful Friday starting chemo, my hair started to thin and fall out a bit.  I knew that I would have to shave it off soon or else go through an unpleasant, extended process of shedding, from which I was warned my bedding would not recover.  I wasn't quite ready to go completely bald, so I opted for a 'transition pixie cut' (my term) and to keep emotion out of it (I was really overthinking these decisions) I went to a different hairdresser to my usual.

About 5 days later, the rate of shedding really stepped up and it became seriously sad and manky. I went to my beloved usual hairdresser, Alison at Hoopla, and told her to shave it off. ‘It’s not a sad occasion, Alison,’ I said. ‘I just want it all off.’ By this point, I was desperate. I know hair is technically dead anyway but after the first round of chemo it really lost any ‘bounce’ or sheen and became a lank, greasy pelt with bald patches that were increasing in size and number.

I had a few headscarves, some given to me by a friend who lived in Singapore, and I started wearing these, or a beanie, and I really enjoyed mixing them up and playing around with power clashing and matching with my outfits.  It was a welcome distraction from the chemo and what I'll call the pall of grumpiness, which, now that the initial shock had passed, was starting to descend on Hunter and me as we realised what we were dealing with. My collection became quite sizeable (and is worthy of its own post).

 

Nevertheless, I did get a wig, but there was some compromise. I had been given an extraordinarily generous donation of cash by my mum’s extended family, which was intended for me to use to buy nice things during treatment so I wouldn’t go without.  To get things going, Hunter and I went to Laksa King for lunch, and then he came with me to the wig shop and I tried on a few different types before choosing a very lovely and stylish wig, which looked like one of my better haircuts.  With the special shampoo, wig stand and brush, the whole bill was $450.  I could have gone all out and got the real high-end, ‘Rolls Royce’ type of wig, made of human hair and almost completely impossible to pick as fake, which costs at least a couple of grand.  Or if you want to think of it another way, about 40 really nice meals with your husband at Laksa King. 

So now I could go out on the street and feel ‘normal’ if I wanted to.

The thing is, I didn't feel normal AT ALL.  There was this pall of grumpiness descending.  I guess it was a combination of sadness and fear, because whatever happened, things would never be the same for us again.  I was 36 and I had cancer. I was going out in a headscarf with a 3 year old and a baby in a pram, for God’s sake. People gave me 'kind eyes' - fleeting, slightly pitying looks, when I was out and about with the kids.  There was no way I was pretending that I was normal.  I would never feel normal again.  Really, I felt like a walking tragedy. 

$10 Halloween wig

And it was serious stage IV stuff too.  Even if I cleared this cancer in the rounds of chemo, Lymphoma would stalk me for the rest of my life.  I would be always wondering if the next check up was the one where I was told it was back.  

I had started seeing a hospital psychologist, a lovely gently-spoken lady who spent a lot of the session nodding and saying 'I hear you' which is very comforting, and she said that Hunter and I were in mourning for our old lives.  We could be as positive as we could manage, and believe me, we were not being 100% negative nellies, but we both knew our lives were changed irrevocably and we missed our old, ‘innocent’ existence.

And one day when the fuzz started
reappearing on my head I just went out bald. 

We did persist with our social lives - we would go to BBQs and see our friends and have coffees and play dates and so forth, and feel out of touch with what everyone else was doing.  I felt like I had no social skills anymore. While everyone was planning holidays and doing renovations and applying for promotions, we were now in a 3 weekly cycle of chemo, stuck in Melbourne with occasional trips to the beach house. Hunter had to defer his study. We talked a lot about cancer, and treatment.  We were very boring company.  We found ourselves rudely unsympathetic to the normal everyday difficulties of modern life. Topics of conversation such as long commute times, creche waiting lists, how tired you feel after an 8k run, the problems with the new iPhone upgrade, made us impatiently roll our eyes. "Don't you know what a real problem is?" I felt like saying sometimes. Of course, it was just straight up jealousy. I actually loved hearing about all these normal problems people were having. 

We were unable to see past the end of treatment. We didn’t even know when or what the end of treatment would be. The doctors had said that it was likely that I would need radiation therapy after chemo.  If that didn’t do the job, then salvage chemo (super strong chemo) and a stem cell transplant would follow.  That would be a really serious development, taking  us well into 2016; making BEACOPP chemo look like a walk in the park, and trashing the odds of my long term survival. For now, the odds were still in our favour (97% of Hodgkin Lymphoma patients in my age group survive) but there was no clear endpoint.  And as I said, even if treatment was a raging success, Lymphoma would stalk me for the rest of my life.  

So. I persisted with the scarves, and I never once wore the wig.  It’s personal for everyone. It's about how you project yourself. It's about cost and time and whether you can be bothered. And it's about whether you want to feel normal, or believe that you could feel normal, and believe that the wig is up to the job.