Buying Conditioner before Chemotherapy
I discovered this cheap miracle hair mask some months ago when I’d had my hair bleached to facilitate blonde highlights. The highlights were an attempt to make a more glamorous transition to grey than the salt-and-pepper ageing my mousy hair would allow. By the time I found the Total Repair Mask my naturally coarse hair had been peroxided twice and the ends were looking more than a little frazzled, so I asked for toner alone to be put on my freshly cut pixie. My hairdresser is fearlessly avant-garde — a quality nearly impossible to find in a largely conservative town — and I adore her. The damage was excised and the new grey-with-a-hint-of-purple suited me. Now I only had to find a good conditioner to keep the pixie from turning into a troll doll. My years of buying the expensive stuff they sell in salons ended with Covid, travel restrictions, and the resultant floundering of my guesthouse. These days my budget allows hair products from supermarket shelves and I get extraordinarily happy when I discover a winner. This one is actually a mask, but I slather handfuls onto my hair every time I wash, using it as conditioner. Today I bought some more.
But next week I have an appointment with an oncologist. The two weeks between diagnosis and doctor’s appointment have been…. uhm, challenging. The thing my autistic ass hates most is NOT KNOWING. Even bad news is better than ignorance, or having to wait for news. I already spent the seven days between mammogram and biopsy in limbo. Three full days between biopsy and results went past in a haze of busy-ness and sleep. I’d assumed that surgery would be next, because that had been the order of things with my partner’s Stage IIIC melanoma diagnosis two years ago. At the end of my last blog entry I was all set to have the surgery and refuse further treatment.
The plan I had mapped out was turned on its head when the surgeon referred me to an oncologist in the same practice. Now we know how well autistics do with changes of plan. At least the two weeks’ wait is giving me time to get used to the change while furiously reading up on neoadjuvant chemotherapy, because knowledge is power and I feel thoroughly disempowered right now. The idea seems to be to do three or six months of chemotherapy first to shrink the tumour and make for less extensive surgery.
I’ve been trying to get used to the idea of chemotherapy. As I sit here I have not decided yet. At times I think of my Zimbabwean assistant who shaves her head by choice and wears beautifully knotted headwraps daily — I could ask her to show me how to tie them. I’d had a number 2 buzz cut before, and it suited me. “You were half your current age then,” I admonish myself. I could wear brightly coloured wigs, the child in me petitions. Then I remember that I cannot handle throwing up. It was the reason I failed at bulimia. (I tried, I really tried.) I’d rather have violent, collapse-on-the-bathroom-mat-and-pray-to-die diarrhoea than have to vomit. Guess what, I might get both. I read that both chemo and hormone therapy will catapult me into menopause instantly. “Well,” I think, “I can’t be too far away from ‘the change’ at 52, might as well get it over with”. But I do not want the chemo brain, a very real cognitive impairment that follows chemotherapy and could stay forever. This I’m not prepared for. I am nothing without my intellect. It’s what I use to compensate for my autism, says every woman with Asperger’s. Memory loss is a dealbreaker, even more than the vomiting.
I have four days of NOT KNOWING left. This weekend we’ll wash our dogs, a short-haired St Bernard who’ll remain bright white for maybe a day before taking a dust bath and a medium-sized Pointer cross who will roll in the dirt while still wet. I will do the usual laundry and prepare the guest cottage for a single booking in December. My Christmas holiday booking cancelled this morning owing to the travel ban instituted by Britain against South Africa just yesterday. We’ll do normal things and enjoy each other’s company. I nap too much and go to bed too early, mostly to escape the feeling of being in a cattle crush onto the chemotherapy conveyor belt. In the last few minutes before falling asleep I am able to pretend I still have choices, and that feels good. And I buy conditioner I may or may not need.
