Hair
Posted 5/27/2010
Posted in
I love this essay by Dana Jennings that just appeared in the New York Times. I love many of his essays, but this one is especially wonderful as it describes his relationship with his hair: anticipating of loss, loss (by choice in is case, read on), and eventual regrowth. Both personally and professionally, I am well aware of what a huge issue hair loss is for most of us. Some people know that it will be a horrible trauma, some people are taken by surprise by the intensity of their reactions, and a few people truly take it more or less in stride. What I especially appreciate in Mr. Jennings' column is that he is a man, and he still cared a lot. Here it is:
A Return to Normalcy, for All to Admire
By DANA JENNINGS
I stare harder into the bathroom mirror these days than I ever have. Not out of some pathetic middle-aged vanity, but more out of curiosity. Two years after learning I had an aggressive prostate cancer, I want to see how my face has been weathered and sculptured by the uncertainty and wisdom wrought by the storms of serious disease.
But really, what I want to check on is my hair. That's right, my hair. I've finally decided to abandon the buzz cut that I got right before my radical open prostatectomy.
I wanted to see what my hair looked like after its hiatus, the same way you want to see a favorite uncle who's been away for a few years in the Army. Well, my hair is still brown,
though it's veined with gray.
When the cancer was most difficult, right after surgery and
during radiation and hormone therapy, the buzz cut helped give me ownership of the disease. It was one of the ways I chose to face this world when I was sick.
I needed the primal ferocity that the buzz cut proclaimed to help keep me going, needed to look like a vintage middle linebacker — Butkus, Nitschke, Huff — as I waltzed and wrestled with cancer. To scare off potential predators, I needed to be a herbivore that looked like a carnivore.
My treatment didn't make my hair fall out, but I also wore the "three-zero" buzz — it was so short, I felt as if I could strike a match on it — to show solidarity with my sisters and brothers in disease who had no choice about whether they kept their hair.
Cancer and its treatment often create an obsession with body image. Hair thins or falls out, skin becomes raw and ravaged, sexuality and libido are throttled by mastectomies,
prostatectomies and other treatments. Then there are the scars — physical and spiritual.
Cancer has made me think more about my looks than I ever
have. Sometimes you'd think I was a teenage girl getting all
swoony over her first prom. (As I gaze in the mirror, I can't help hearing my mother's voice: Whenever my sister or I would ask her whether we were good-looking, she'd reply, "Oh, you'll pass in a crowd." Thanks, Mom.)
In letting my hair grow, I'm acknowledging to the world that I'm finally emerging from the life-changing chrysalis of cancer. It's a gesture of optimism, a way to define — and refine — my postcancer self.
The guy with cancer who weighed almost 230 pounds (from hormone therapy) and wore a buzz cut is gone. I weigh 200 pounds today, and my hair is growing.
On the more practical level, brisking a wet cloth over my scalp no longer qualifies as washing my hair. And once again I have to worry about the indignities of nap hair and hat hair. I'm happy to pay that price.
I don't want to give the wrong impression, to be a prostate-cancer Pollyanna. I still have physical issues: fatigue, depression, libido and sexual function. But I no longer feel like a cancer patient. Instead, I feel like someone who had cancer.
Cancer won't let you stand still. In a couple of short years, I've gone from my clueless precancer self (whom I can hardly bear to look at in old photos), to my cancer-patient self who simply wanted to be alive for his sons' weddings and children, to my canny postcancer self, who takes nothing in this sweet old world for granted — even the fact that my cancer may return. Especially that fact.
All of this reinforces just how important a seemingly simple gesture can be after cancer. To most men, a haircut is just a haircut, a pleasant Saturday-morning ritual redolent of shaving cream and the manly sting and slap of rubbing alcohol on the neck. But for me it's an
absolute decision about how to be in this world.
After a long winter of cancer, its treatment and all of the side effects, my postcancer spring is here and my hair is growing in, as thick and unruly as the vines and bushes behind my garage.
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