Mummy’s hair permeates the children more than I realise. Although my hair’s been falling out for a few days now, there is still so much on my head I didn’t think they had noticed anything. But they have heard the talk, obviously. My daughters are at their father’s when I start losing hair - I tell them on the phone. As they come back through the front door, I see them check my head, first thing. “It looks normal, just thin,” one says. “I didn’t know how it would fall out - show us.” So I put fingers to my head, and whole tresses come away. But there’s still a lot to go.
So much so that at my second chemotherapy session, my oncologist Peter Ostler looks at my head and says, “See, nobody would know you’re having treatment.” I stare at him in disbelief; my hair is thin, dry and woolly. Dr Ostler says not to touch it too much. I’m already covering it every day with a bandanna, though I don’t have the right big hoop earrings yet. Also, I really should wear the bandanna further down my forehead, I realise from star-gazing in Hello! magazine.
Round here, where so many women wear scarves over their hair for religious Jewish reasons, I want to look edgy, fashionable, not covered. It doesn’t work, though - the first time I go to the supermarket bandanna-ed, the (non-Jewish but local) woman on the till who sees me more than most friends, says: “Oh, have you become more orthodox?”
Medically, I have a new obsession. Dr Ostler measures the lump this second session, and it is smaller, by one centimetre. The thought that’s starting to occupy me is this: if the chemotherapy shrinks the tumour, why then do I need a mastectomy rather than a lumpectomy? Don’t doctors have a history of doing too much that is unnecessary to women? I don’t raise it yet; it’s just beginning to fester.
Meanwhile, Dr Ostler is chatting, telling me the results of the latest tests. My tumour is oestrogen negative. “Oestrogen positive is the good kind, isn’t it?” I say. “Well, we can treat oestrogen positive ones with certain drugs,” he says, “but don’t think that you’d rather have that type, because there are so many variables.” One of the issues around my sort of tumour is whether to remove the ovaries - he says this tentatively - although, he adds, the latest research seems to indicate that taking them out isn’t all that helpful. “The findings are reported twice a year,” he says, “so the next conference will be in time for you.”
“Very mobile lymph node,” he adds, using his ruler under my arm now. “But that is good, isn’t it?” “Not when you’re trying to measure it,” he says. A nurse - not Julie, my usual chemo nurse, whose back problems have flared up - comes in with the cold cap. I tell Dr Ostler that I’ve heard some people won’t wear one, to make sure the drugs reach everywhere in the body. “That,” says my oncologist, “would only apply to about 2% of women who have a cancer that’s spread to other organs, not one this local. But somebody is told something like that, then it filters down to everyone. The internet,” he says, returning to one of his favourite themes, “is not the best place to find information, except the few recognised sites, like Bacup. Really, don’t go on the net.”
The centre parting of my hair is so painfully bare, I flinch when I see it. Still, I figure I’ll give the cold cap one last fling. “Oh, hair’s coming out,” the nurse says as she adjusts the shower-cap like device. “Have you got a wig?”
I’ve been trying to arrange a time with Sarah, my hairdresser, to cut my hair off completely, but she can’t do it for a few days. Meanwhile, what’s left of my hair is matted and wild. It is the worst week.
My older children look shell-shocked when I come back home after I finally see Sarah for a buzz-cut.
That night one of the older girls is crying quietly in the bathroom. She tells me her own hair is thinning because I make her wash it too often.
18 March 2021: this article has been edited to remove some personal information.
