It's a hair affair....

Losing your hair. It's pretty common knowledge that bald heads and cancer seem to go hand in hand. I really haven't been overly concerned about this aspect of it. For starters I kind of figured that I could lose 75% of my hair and still be just fine. I would just look like most other people! Unfortunately a little education on the matter blew that theory out the window. Obviously I'm no medical expert, but at this point it's my understanding that cancer occurs when cells divide rapidly and are not being repaired properly and basically mutate. So the job of chemotherapy is to attack rapidly dividing cells. Finger nails, toe nails, tissues in your mouth, and hair follicles are all considered rapidly dividing cells that end up being innocent victims of your chemo treatments. That's why its fairly common to lose some nails, have mouth sores and lose your hair. Apparently, the faster your hair grows and the thicker your hair is, that means those cells are dividing more rapidly than your average persons hair follicles. So when chemo enters the system and is looking for those rapidly dividing cells.....the thicker your hair is, the faster your hair grows, the quicker it's going to fall out. Again, I'm no medical expert so please don't quote me on this but this is information I've been told and have read in the process of all the research I've done. So I'm kind of assuming I'm going to be bald for a while! A piece of advice I've been given from several people is to cut the long hair off before it starts falling out. For hygenic purposes it's much easier not to have big long clumps of laying around but more importantly, for psychological reasons. To go from really long thick hair to being bald is a pretty big jump so many recommend that you take some baby steps and have some fun with some short hairstyles first.

All the girls in this house have long thick hair! I wish I had a picture of Ashley Brandi Kendra and myself!

A dear friend and hairstylist Kortnie had told me that when I was ready she wanted to treat me to a cut and color. So this week I had a day with no Dr. appointments and decided to go for it!

Those bushy looking squirrel tales on the cupboard are ponytails she cut off. There is a place where you can bring your hair in and they will make you a wig out of your own hair! But I really didn't feel like it was worth the hassle and money that would take! So I told her to just ship them off to whatever wig making company they felt was reputable.

The idea of making such a drastic change was a little intimidating at first but shoot, once you've chopped off your boobs chopping off you hair really doesn't seem like all that big of deal. Plus I figured worse case scenario...if I really hated it, it's probably all going to fall out in a couple weeks anyway!!

Turns out, I love it! Its super easy!! Get up and run my fingers through it in the morning and I'm pretty much done. Will definitely make it so much easier. With my limited arm movement it's been pretty tough being able to get my hair done decently so there's been a lot of days where I've been a hot mess! Kind of wishing now that I would have done this earlier so I could enjoy it longer:)