Meet my new hairstylist: Cancer
It's still not me in the mirror.
It's obviously my teeth being brushed with my toothbrush. Who else's face would it be, holding the mouth with my teeth in it?
Outside, I see my shadow and then look around for Little Orphan Annie.
A year and a half ago, at 39, I qualified for the 'adolescents and young adults' category of cancer patients. It's nice to still be precocious! The breast cancer survivorship predictions that my doctors showed me were all fairly reassuring, as these things go, especially since I chose to get chemotherapy. But the statistics we have are all based on previous generations that didn't tend to get cancer this young. Nobody knows why this is happening.
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Anyway, I went bald. It was an adventure. I was aerodynamic. The shower drain never needed cleaning. More strangers complimented my head than ever in my life. I liked it, too, as an experiment with a defined end point: Life would return to normal. When chemo ended, I would not, and my hair would come back.
It did not. Hair came back, but it was someone else's hair. Thicker, fluffier — and curly. The hair, in fact, that I had tried for years to achieve, without success. Thanks, cancer!
The writer holds a photo of herself with no hair, holding a photo of herself with long, straight hair. (Allison Robbert/For The Washington Post)
As a youth, I was disappointed by the hair I'd always had; it was mismatched with what I felt my hair should be. Wild. Untamed. Anything but droopy, flat and always the same.
The hair my brain recognizes as mine was also Marcia Brady's, except thinner. Three feet long, straight, never ever gonna curl or have body or volume. I wasn't born knowing that. I spent decades going to CVS, looking uncertainly at one product or another. A kind of corn starch you massaged into your roots. Or a 400-degree crimper. Or various goos and sprays and objects you wrap your hair around. These came home with me for another episode of 'The Hair That Wouldn't Do Squat.'
Now, the hair does everything. In 360 degrees. All at once. Marcia Brady is gone from my mirror, and Richard Simmons is in her place.
Ask the internet, and medical sites tell you that chemotherapy sometimes changes your hair follicles. Also, it sometimes doesn't. And these changes last about nine months, or two years, or some other amount of time, including forever.
A lack of published scientific information about chemo curls didn't stop expert scientific explainer guy Hank Green from finding out more. He undertook his own in vivo experiment, subjecting himself to chemotherapy in the name of science, and also because he had Hodgkin's lymphoma.
The experiment worked: He emerged a cancer-free, curly-haired man (though he has straightened back out now). 'It might have something to do with the shape of the follicle or the proteins being produced, or how the cells are arranged in there as they heal,' he says. 'But as of now, we don't really know.'
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It gets weirder: Chemo enabled him to grow a beard, whereas before he only shaved once a week. People online have reported that their curls also change with birth control, pregnancy and gender transition. The New Yorker has a story about chemo essentially curing a woman's schizophrenia.
Curls are fluff. This isn't where we should spend our disappearing science funding. And a study won't tell me what I want to know, which is that my curls will stay this way at least long enough for me to Figure Out Curls. Several lifetimes' worth of watching TikToks await. Plus, I do situational research.
Recently, when a ringleted Apple Store guy asked if he could help me, the first thing I said was, 'What is your curl routine?' He said shampoo once a week. Score.
The writer's curls. (Allison Robbert/For The Washington Post)
At first, my hair came back as you'd expect, as the softest stubble. At about half an inch, though, there started to be a distinct ripple. The ripple evolved into '90s Billy Crystal (I clearly was not specific enough when I wished for the hair in 'When Harry Met Sally…'). There was a Nancy Reagan moment. And since then, it has gotten darker — and more and more (and more) poodle.
I call this the haircut nobody asks for, or Baby's First 'Do. It has changed the shape of my face. Old friends don't recognize me. They seem to share some of the discomfort I feel standing in front of the mirror: Who is this? It's like I uncanny-valleyed myself.
As soon as I knew that my diagnosis probably wouldn't kill me, I started focusing on the moment I could go back to being the me who wasn't sick (or more precisely, and cruelly: the me who did not know she was sick). Cancer friends (that's a category now) reassured me it would happen. But the curls have blocked my fantasy that I could be the same person again. They force me to transition from 'surviving' to 'survivor.'
Chemo did a bunch of things besides maybe saving my life. It aged my skin, weakened my bones and made me have to pee about twice as frequently. One of my eyebrows didn't really come back. I get shots to keep me in menopause. Fear makes me draw a mark on my leg where I feel a bone ache, and take a picture so I know if it's in the same place the next time it aches. Bones are often where breast cancer metastasizes.
Whether I accept it or not, I am old. Older.
But there's only one way not to get older — surprise, it's dying — and I faced it last year. I took poison in hopes of someday looking good for 55. I'd prefer it not be, like, today.
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After months of treatment and feeling, oh, let's call it liberated from the concept of pretty, it's wonderfully odd to have a whole new kind of pretty dropped on my shoulders. It has also been pretty great to have a reconstruction surgeon earnestly asking me what kind of breasts I would like. (WHERE WAS HE WHEN I WAS 15?)
It's been a kind of strange reverse-puberty. New hair, boobs and hormones! Everyone treats you differently now!
The woman who didn't know she had cancer had mastered denial. She was almost absurdly, determinedly carefree, driving a 23-year-old car and being astonished when it broke down. She didn't go to the doctor regularly. She didn't even have a doctor. Nothing bad could happen to her. The disease fed on her immaturity.
I don't get to be her anymore. I have to grow up, and acknowledge that it's really me in the mirror.
But to the extent that hair is identity, getting a new mirror image at 41 is a gift. I'm a new me in a way that isn't gray and wrinkles and aches. And I have no idea — none at all — what I'll look like, what I'll be, in three months. Talk about staying young.
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My face isn't mine in the mirror, but the hair finally, somehow, matches my spirit. She is wild. She is a gift. A lifeline that I'm not getting more staid in middle age. A bridge, you might say — but also some troubled water.…
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