No Hair, Don’t Care: How Cancer, Chemo, and One Epic Buzz Cut Conspired for a Bold New Look

I’m sure I would feel differently if I had great hair. Trademark hair. Botticelli curls or Pantene Pro-V hair. I don’t. What I’ve got is ordinary, except for the ways in which it is kind of bad. My hair is dully brown, somehow both greasy and dry, fine as a baby’s. It’s straight and lifeless, except where it cowlicks, and tangles and generally misbehaves.

Perhaps you can understand why losing it was not the tragedy I was warned it would be?

When you are diagnosed with cancer, you meet with many oncologists. They are almost all men. They do not talk to you about how sick chemotherapy will make you feel, about anxiety, depression, or doom. They talk about hair loss. It’ll take you awhile to come around to the idea of it, I am told matter-of-factly by one early contender, a George W. Bush doppelgänger. It’s harder for women.

I move on to other doctors, ones with less Republican faces and better bedside manners. They all want to discuss my hair. Even if you can’t imagine wanting one, get a wig. Get one even if you only wear it one day of your whole treatment. Go now, it may take a long time to find the right one. Don’t go alone. Take your mom, take your sister, take your best friend. Take your boyfriend. Make a date of it. Take a picture of someone whose hair you’ve always wanted. Take a picture of your own hair on a day you liked how it looked. You can’t imagine how this is going to feel. Get two wigs! One for fun and one for real. Go while you still have the energy to fight with your insurance company about how many wigs you have the right to get.

I find a doctor I would follow off the edge of a cliff. Even if you don’t want a wig wig, he says while the first round of chemotherapy drips into my veins, you may want to get a winter hat with a ponytail attached to the back of it, so you can run out to the store without attracting any attention. He is not joking, but my boyfriend Jake and I laugh about this for months. I try to imagine such a contraption. Would I keep it hanging on a hook by the door, a sad little Davy Crockett cap to slip on and face the world?

In preparation for chemotherapy I get a lymph node excised, a bone marrow biopsy, an echocardiogram, a pulmonary evaluation, a flu shot, an HIV test. I get three cavities filled and my gums scraped. I don’t get a wig. I can’t wrap my mind around the idea of walking into a room wearing someone else’s hair. I can imagine walking into a room and blurting out: Do you guys like my wig? Is my wig on straight? Do you think this wig looks cool? I am too sarcastic for wig-life. I am terrified of not being in on the joke, that the joke will be me.

My body hair falls out first. I notice in the bath, pubic hair curling up and floating on the surface of the water. Time moves backward. My legs become smooth, my armpits empty, my pelvis prepubescent. For a few fun weeks I have a full head of hair and the hairless body that women spend serious money trying to maintain. When I start to go bald, it’s subtle: strands on my pillowcase, clinging to my sweaters, clogging the shower drain. I abandon shampoo, conditioner, combs, brushes. I am disturbed to observe that my hair-loss pattern matches that of my father. My hairline recedes, the crown becomes stringy, and a fringe around the sides stubbornly holds on. Think John Malkovich. Picture Wallace Shawn. It looks better on them.

It’s winter and our house is cold. I wear a hat and try to forget about what’s happening underneath. Sometimes when I get out of the shower I take a photo of myself in the mirror, a record for a future life. Mostly I hide. Jake and I talk about shaving my head, but we don’t own clippers, we never pull the trigger. It’s easier to do nothing. I’m scared of my own scalp, which I imagine to be misshapen and lumpy.

I go into remission in March. We invite our friends to a bar to celebrate. I wear a leopard-print silk shirt, dark skinny jeans, patent leather ankle boots. I am making an effort, the first in a long time. At the bar Jake puts his arm around me and accidentally knocks my hat off. I avoid eye contact, pick it up, furtively pull it back on. Two girlfriends swoop in to assure me that I’m beautiful. I excuse myself to get another drink, burning with shame. The joke is on me.

The next day I take a nail scissors and cut off everything I can, the nappy chemo-resistant tufts that have not been washed or brushed or so much as touched in three months. I call the salon I used to go to before I was sick and ask if they’ll shave the rest. We don’t do that, the girl on the other end of the line says weakly. I hang up and ride my bike over anyway, demand that they help me. They do.

You have a good scalp, the girl who buzzes my head tells me. At home I examine it in the bathroom mirror. It’s true. I’m six feet tall with square bony shoulders and a pin head that I’ve always made fun of. It works in my favor now: I am delicate, feminine, a Sinead O’Connor, not a Britney Spears. Your eyes look enormous, my mother tells me. I start wearing red lipstick and a hunter green motorcycle jacket. I try to channel Robin Tunney in Empire Records, the damaged girl with the punk rock attitude and the quick wit. I have been beaten to a pulp, but I have come out the other side. I’ve proved difficult to squash. I can take a punch and then joke about it afterwards.

If I’m shy about being out in public it passes quickly. I go to rock concerts, fly on airplanes, eat at fancy restaurants. I attract attention. Alopecia? A gleamingly bald male bartender asks after sneaking looks at me from across the room. But most people assume this is a choice, that I’m edgy, avant-garde. I interview for a job at a fashion magazine and get it. Cancer never comes up, and I’m fairly sure nobody guesses. They think I’m fashion-forward, on trend. That is so rad, I hear from silky-, long-haired ladies. I wish I were brave enough. At a music venue in Brooklyn, a girl with a star razored into the side of her head gives me a smile and a nod from across the room. She thinks we are the same. I let her think it.

For thirty years I’ve been the woman with the boring hair; suddenly I’m the one with the cool hair. It is starting to fill in, coming in blonder, curlier, funkier. There’s a Jean Seberg moment, a Justin Bieber stage, a modified faux hawk. Each one comes with its own rhythm, its own style. I enjoy the attention. About nine months into remission the front grows long enough to do a little side-parted flop over my forehead. I immediately hate it, am disgusted by that alien, messy feeling of hanging hair, unchecked growth, malignancy.

I think about baldness often, the smooth, bare, naked straightforwardness of it. I consider shaving my head but inertia wins. Besides, would it feel the same if I chose it? If I had to choose to maintain it? What I really want is that blank slate feeling, that new beginning, to freeze life in a moment when I knew exactly where I stood. The farther I get away from illness, the farther from the last clean scan, the more I stand to lose. Time hurtles forward, reaching out into the unknown. My hair grows back. It is a clock, marking days, counting up from one thing, down to the next.

 

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