Body hair update

I first started noticing that my body hair was falling out about two weeks into chemotherapy.

I had taken off my light blue pyjama shirt one morning before I stepped into the shower and I noticed that its inside had suddenly become fur lined. Amazingly, my chest did not seem three worse for wear, despite a cat's work of body hair now insulating my clothing. Showers became more of a curiosity too, as I would amuse myself with noticing how much hair I had to pick out of the drain every morning after a wash.

That amusement came to an end once I started drying myself off and found clumps of my head hair in my towel.

One barber trip and a few more sessions of chemo later and I was bald. Even the bushy caterpillars that were my eyebrows disappeared. I spent the Berlin winter constantly wearing a toque (that's "beanie" for you non-Canadians out there) and turtlenecks to keep me warn since my normal hairy layer was out of commission.

My chemo ended nearly four months ago, and my hair has started to return. The top of my head is almost an inch thick, while the rest of my torso has regrown with a vengeance. There are only two spots on my body that haven't seen hair regrowth yet. When I strip myself naked day I laugh when I see them, because the hair desert is so precisely delineated that it looks like I've been maintaining it out of some twisted comedic sense.

Those two spots are the areas that I had my radiation treatment in during Jan-Feb.

My tumour was on my upper left inner thigh, near my groin. The radiation treatment involved strapping something resembling an oversized apricot-flavoured fruit leather to the tumour and then firing a decent dosage of radiation at it for a few minutes for three weeks. As a result of that my tumour disappeared (hopefully forever) along with all of the hair that was under the leather.

Picture a hairier than normal leg, and then an oblong of rectangle of bare skin. It's like looking out of an airplane and seeing the farmer's fields in the middle of a forest.

As for the second hairless spot, remember this: radiation travels through the body. Flesh and bone is not enough to absorb the beam. The entry point of the radiation is hairless. So is the exit point.

I hope that it grows back eventually. It feels very strange being asymmetrically hairless.

🍑