FROM HAIR TO THERE: A Lesson in Acceptance

"Give me a head of hair, long beautiful hair, shining, streaming, gleaming, flaxen, waxen ..."  From Hair, the Musical

When I graduated from middle school, my yearbook had captions under the names of each of the students.  Descriptions like "Most Likely to Become President," "Most likely to Marry a Millionaire," "Most Likely to Win the Nobel Prize."  These were given to each of the graduates by their fellow classmates.  Under my photo was a curious caption, "Girl Most Likely to Become Lady Godiva."  Yes, I know, odd.  I've often wondered how the teachers let that one go through, but in a way it was completely appropriate.  You see, I've always had long hair.  Sometimes below my waist, but most always flowing down my back.  I suppose it's my Italian heritage that enables me to grow it as long as I want and I'm grateful, because as a child I felt terribly ordinary and my hair was the one thing that made me feel special, dare I say, beautiful.  

With few exceptions, throughout my life I kept my hair long.  Oh, there was that time in the Eighties when I chopped it all off, dyed it bright orange, and spiked it out.  What was I thinking?  Not sure.  It certainly wasn't my intention to look like a member of A Flock of Seagulls, but I assure you I did.  Happily, once I came to my senses, it didn't take long for me to grow it all back because, like I said, I'm blessed with the good hair gene.

So what happens when you feel attached to your hair and wake up two weeks after having your first round of chemotherapy and see piles of it on the pillow?  The answer is you panic.  And I did.  No amount of warning prepared me.  One day it was fine and the next day it was falling out in handfuls.  It was the oddest thing and it was mortifying.  Of course, I knew it would happen at some point, although it did come sooner than my doctor had advised, and I knew that it would only be temporary, but the idea that I would have to face even six months without hair depressed me. 

After about an hour of private hysteria I called my pal Jennie, one of my style gurus.  "I'm going to be so ugly (sob sob) ... who will find me attractive (sob sob) ... how will I get through this (sniffle sniffle sniffle)?"  Well, Jennie, a take-no-prisoners kind of a gal, wheeled over in her Jeep and whisked me off to several very nice stores where she bought me hip colorful scarves and showed me how to tie them fashionably around my head.  I was grateful for the help, but inside I was madder at my cancer than a hornet that's been sat on by a bull!  I didn't wanna know how to tie scarves, I didn't wanna look like a socialite sunning herself on the Isle of Capri.  No!  I just wanted to have my hair back!  But that wasn't to be and I knew it.  So, once again, I did my very best impression of a brave girl and went and got my head buzzed a la GI Jane.  What a surprise to see myself, really see myself, for the first time.  No hair, just eyes and lips and cheekbones.  Nothing to frame my face except my big ears.  It was fascinating, but it made me cry all the more.  I ... wanted ... my ... hair!  I would wake in the middle of the night, go into the bathroom, and stare in the mirror trying to fill in the hair like one of those childhood Hair Do Harriet games where you move around fuzzy metal shards with a magic magnetic wand.  Where was that magic wand now?

I suffered through the trauma of hair loss until the Monday after my buzz cut when my wonderful sister once again came to my rescue.  Leslie took me to a wig shop in Manhattan and we had a great time as I tried on all sorts of lengths, colors, and styles.  What I learned that day was that hair really does change your look.  You can be Marilyn Monroe, Diana Ross, Marianne Faithful, even Tina Turner.  We had lots of laughs as we picked out two completely different personalities.  One was a short, sassy, honey-colored cut and the other was a sophisticated platinum bob.  Now I could be Sassy Diane or Sophisticated Diane according to my mood.  And in the tradition of "it takes a village," so many of my good girlfriends pitched in to help with designer scarves, summer hats, and the crowning glory to my collection, a long blonde wig gifted to me by my darling friend Nikki.  When I put it on in the wig shop and looked into the mirror I finally felt like me again. 

Now let's talk about the men in my life.  They were wonderful too.  I have lots of great guy friends and they all, without exception, confessed that they found bald women sexy (due, in no small part I'm assuming, to the pioneering efforts of Sinead O'Connor, Demi Moore, and Veeger, the robot cum space probe in the first Star Trek movie).  A couple of guys even told me they'd shave their heads in solidarity.  I was told that I was sexy and beautiful no matter whether I had hair or not.  What an outpouring of support.  

My new hair consciousness got me to thinking about how strongly hair is tied in with our standards of beauty and how I wasn't the only one who was preoccupied with it.  People who have curly hair want straight.  People who have straight want curly.  There's the myth of blondes having more fun, redheads being fast, brunettes being sultry.  We cut our hair, perm our hair, color our hair, weave our hair.  Our fairy tales show beautiful heroines with long, lush locks -- Cinderella, Pocahontas, and let's not forget Rapunzel.

So I defy anyone to tell me that it doesn't matter when you go bald in a culture that is obsessed with hair ... especially when you're a woman.  But as with any other major change in life, it's an opportunity for self-discovery, albeit one that's forced upon you.  Every woman who I've talked to who has lost her hair to cancer has had to come to terms with it.  Personally, I've railed at the gods, cried, and complained, but I am finally making peace with it.  It's not because I'm so evolved that I can handle this hair crisis on my own.  Oh, no, no, no.  It's because over and over again the people around me who I trust and love have reinforced the belief that my beauty does not depend on my hair.  I'm a strong woman with an inner and outer beauty that they value and appreciate.  And you know what?  I now look at my bald self in the mirror and think that I am beautiful, not in spite of my baldness, but because of it.  It has been a stunning realization.  In fact, just this afternoon something happened that showed me that I've come to terms with this no-hair phase of my life.  I actually walked out of the house bald.  I'd completely forgotten that I hadn't covered my head with a wig, a hat, or even a scarf, and I didn't mind at all.  Guess I've finally gotten from hair ... to there.

The C Word ... CAN'T

I've always been a glass half full kind of a gal.  Struck by the normal tragedies of life I would try to look on the bright side.  When I tripped on a soda can on a crowded subway platform at 42nd and Lexington and my purse, along with credit cards, ID, and $200 worth of make-up, flew onto the tracks I picked myself up, brushed myself off and said to no one in particular, "Oh, well, I needed a new mascara anyway."  When I found out that my new fabulous boyfriend was cheating on me with several other women, I said to my girlfriends, "Oh, well, he drank too much anyway."  (I can still see their collective heads nodding in serious agreement.)  When I lost a coveted music job to another singer I said to my sister, "Oh, well, that'll just leave my schedule open for more gigs."  Oh, please, do you really think I believed those things?  Not completely, but enough so that they eased the sting.

It's a human mechanism to try to turn a negative into a positive.  We come up with sayings like "The sun will come out tomorrow," "Every cloud has a silver lining," and "You're not getting older, you're getting better." (By the way, that last chestnut was penned by the father of yours truly and I don't think he ever had a really positive day in his life.)  Yes, most of us hold on to any little thing to encourage us that life doesn't suck when bad things happen to nice people.  But then there are the other times, the times when no perky little platitude will help.  No amount of "ac-cen-tu-ate the positive and e-lim-in-ate the negative" will change a bad to a good -- or so you think at the moment.  Discovering my cancer was one of those moments.

Round January of this year I'd already suspected that something was wrong.  One winter night as I pulled the covers over my body in an effort to get warm, my hand brushed against something that felt suspiciously like a lump in my breast.  I touched it lightly hoping that I'd imagined it.  "No, it can't be," I thought.  So I yanked the blanket over my head and fell into a blissfully ignorant sleep.

Can't, it's the word that most of us use when we are faced with obstacles that are too difficult to overcome or comprehend.  "I can't be fired," "I can't be broke." "My boyfriend can't be cheating on me."  "I can't have cancer!"  We stomp our feet against fate thinking that if we say it enough times the powers that be will hear us and take all the bad things away.  "Denial is a coping mechanism," a good friend recently told me.  Well, if that's true, I was in the coping cabana and I wasn't coming out anytime soon.  For five months I pretended that the lump wasn't there.  Like having a mosquito bite or poison ivy, I imagined that if I didn't touch it it wouldn't get any worse.  Even when I had my yearly Well Woman Check-up I neglected to mention anything to my doctor.  "I can't tell her because if I do she might find it."   And as she wrote me a prescription for my yearly mammogram I thought to myself, "I can't have one because I don't have health insurance yet."  You see, I'd let mine lapse because I was moving from New Jersey to New York and I knew I could get a better plan there.  I'd actually talked myself into thinking that not being covered by health insurance insured me against having cancer.  

And how did I finally overcome the can't?  Well, a good friend posted a video on Facebook of a remake of the 1990 Divinyl's song, "I Touch Myself."  When the original came out the song's meaning was, to say the least, sexually provocative, but the message of this new video was completely different.  It was now an anthem for breast cancer awareness.  Stark in its presentation, the video showed beautiful, strong women singing directly to the camera -- to me -- about overcoming denial, about touching your own body to help yourself.  Suddenly my "can't" became  "should," "can," and finally, "will."   The very next day I called to make an appointment for my mammogram and started the ball rolling toward dealing with the problem.

So what's the moral of my can't-cer story?  Well, nothing too lofty or complicated.  Simply that no matter how fearful you are of the outcome, denying the truth doesn't get you any closer to solving the problem.  There are times when changing a negative to a positive means putting your big girl pants on and finding a little courage.  Actually, most anyone can ... not can't.  

For more information on the I Touch Myself Project, please visit http://itouchmyself.org/

JUICE AND COOKIES

When I was in first grade I couldn't wait for recess.  After a morning of hard work reading Dick and Jane, we'd be rewarded with our juice and cookies. There were no juice boxes then, just giant economy sized cans of grape or apple or orange that our teacher would pour  into tiny waxed paper cups.  And we didn't have designer cookies either.  No Organic Fig Newman's individually packaged for optimal pre-sanitized consumption.  No sir.  Just ol' reliable Oreos or Lorna Doones taken out of the carton by my teacher's chalk-marked hands and placed on paper plates.  We'd stuff our mouths with the sweet confections and drink juice until our tongues were stained blue or red or green with FDA approved food coloring.  And when our tummies were full, and we were ready for nap time, we'd lay our heads on our desks and fall to sleep, trusting for a little while that we'd be safe in our slumber.  

Trust.  It's a big deal.  Without it, life would go haywire.  Take stoplights, we trust that whoever is in charge of those stoplights knows how to time them so that we don't go all bumper car on each other.  And airplanes?  Well, we trust that air traffic controllers know how to do their job well enough so that they can juggle hundreds of take-offs and landings on a single airstrip.  We trust that our spouses will love us "until death do us part," and that our families will tolerate us when we exhibit less than stellar behavior because we've been mostly good at other times.  And then, of course, there's the ultimate trust -- that the sun will rise every 24 hours onto a new day so that we can start trusting all over again.

Trust is an essential thing when you're diagnosed with a serious illness.  Suddenly you have to look to professionals who you've never met to make you better, and in some cases, save your life.  It's an interesting phenomenon.  How do you figure out who to trust?  Well, you can get recommendations, you can read reviews, you can meet the professionals, but it still all boils down to, "Can I trust that what you're saying to me is true and that you know what you're doing?"  It's huge, this trust thing.

So you trust. You submit yourself to pokings and prodings, biopsies and surgeries from doctors, nurses, physician's assistants, techs, and a whole host of support staff who five minutes before have been strangers. I can't tell you how many times in the past couple of months I've found myself squeezing the hand of a kind nurse or technician while I'm being put through some procedure that scares the bejesus out of me.  I've become the Blanche Dubois of patients -- always depending on the kindness of strangers.  Again, trust.

For me, one of the most profound moments of trust occurred the day I had to have a port implanted under my skin.  These miraculous little devices allow a person who is going through chemotherapy to avoid being stuck countless times with needles.  It's almost invisible and lives with you for the duration of your treatment. Of course, silly me didn't realize that I was going to have to go through a surgical procedure to get it.  I thought I'd waltz into the hospital in the morning and walk out an hour later with a minimal amount of stress to my body.  You can you imagine my surprise when I was taken into a room, given a surgical gown, and told I'd be going into the operating room a few minutes later.  My reaction?  "I'm gonna have to do what?!?"  Yep, there'd be some serious testing of this trust thing now.

Before going to the OR, an intake nurse came to check my vitals and ask the requisite questions. "What's your birthday?"  "Are you allergic to any medications?"  "What's your favorite Sex in the City episode?"  (No, not really, but I do wish they'd ask me something like that every once in a while just to break the monotony.)  During the course of the inquisition, the nurse misinterpreted my nervousness about the procedure for a fear of dying. "Don't worry, honey," she assured me, "You'll be fine.  Besides, when it's your time, it's your time.  You can just as easily get hit by a car crossing the street to the hospital as die from your disease." (I nodded my head in agreement, but was now so traumatized that I began to crave a paper bag to breathe into.)  Next, so as to illustrate her particular philosophy, she volunteered that she'd previously been a psych ward nurse.  There, she'd had a patient who'd tried to kill himself for years.  He tried drinking rat poison, but didn't die.  He tried jumping out of a window, but didn't die.  He tried every which way to Sunday to off himself, but didn't die.  Finally, he decided that it was a message from God that he wasn't supposed to die.  So he pulled himself together and got better.  Really better.  He got a job, became a model citizen, and even found love, deep, meaningful love with a wonderful woman, and they got married.  After which he promptly got cancer and died.  OH ... MY ... GOD!!!

After imparting her grizzly wisdom, the nurse left me alone ... no doubt to terrorize another unsuspecting patient.  I was now so upset that I snuck back into the dressing room and phoned my sister. "I can't go through this anymore," I cried, "I'm done.  I'm leaving!"  Of course, my wonderful sister talked me down for the hundredth time since the treatment process had begun, and I was able to go back out and wait for the nurse to return.  But she never did, thank goodness.  Instead, the next person to walk into the room was a tall, pleasant looking physician's assistant.  His bedside manner was completely different.  He was calm and kind, and took the time to answer every one of my questions.  He saw that I'd been crying and asked me why. I didn't tell him about Nurse House-of-Horrors, but instead explained my other problem.  "I'm really hungry.  I haven't eaten since early last night and I don't think I'm gonna make it."  "You can have some juice and cookies after the procedure."  My face lit up.  "Juice and cookies?"  "Yep," he promised, "And as much as you want."  Well, that changed everything, I'd be okay.  All I had to do was keep my eyes on the prize.

A few minutes later they wheeled me into the OR.  A staff of five, including my favorite juice and cookie PA, worked to prepare me for the implant.  "How you doin'?" he'd ask every few minutes.  "Okay, I guess. Will I get my juice and cookies later?"  "Absolutely," he assured me.  "Well, then I'm fine."  Even when I was under sedation in twilight sleep I'm told I asked about my postoperative treats.  Something about that simple reward went straight back to that time of innocence and trust.  And when I was finally wheeled into Recovery, my PA made sure to have the staff get me whatever juice and cookies I wanted.  And you know what?  The juice was served to me in one of those tiny waxed paper cups.  I trusted, and he delivered.

So trust.  It comes in a variety of shapes and sizes.  It can be the grand pooh-bah of trust where you put yourself in the hands of a surgeon who will literally work to save your life, or it can be the more intimate kind of trust where you know that a loved one will be there for you when you need reassurance that everything's gonna be all right. But no matter what, you gotta try to find it, because it may just be the one thing that gets you through a really bad day.  Kinda like juice and cookies.