"Look at this!" - hair

(This hat is courtesy of Susan at work. Susan says to tell her what color Robin would like the next hat to be!)

This morning Robin came up to me like an inquisitive kid with her fist clenched saying "look at this" - she was holding about 15 hairs in the palm of her hand. Over the course of the week she has noticed an increasing rate of hair loss. This evening she stood over the bathroom sink running her hands through her hair and in about a minute she had over one hundred hairs in the sink.

I feel a little let down. If her hair was going to fall out I expected it to be in great big clumps. There would be *no question* that it was time to shave her head. Instead of a sense that a significant event has occurred, I feel like it's no big deal - just a few more hairs appearing each day.

In a way it's like the cancer itself. It first gave a clue of its existence in mid-June as a slight bloody nose. For three days in a row Robin experienced just a brief nosebleed. By the third day I expect she was beginning to adjust to the idea of having daily nosebleeds, but that evening a headache began which grew and grew until it was the most severe pain she had ever experienced. I was out of town at the time. She called the next morning at 8:00am to tell me the pain had been so bad that she had taken seven Advils in ninety minutes and that it had minimal impact on her level of pain.

I was already due to fly home at 1:30pm that day, after a moment of reflection on priorities I called the travel agent and changed to 10:30am. I then tried to tell my boss that I had rebooked and was leaving, but I was already so upset he thought I was simply trying to ask his advice about whether or not to leave early. It's funny to think back now and wonder why I had been so upset when we did not even know what was going on yet. By 2:00pm we were in the office of Robin's primary care doctor, starting this process.

Our alarm thresholds are much higher these days. For instance Robin's right cheek continues to grow in size since the chemo. In addition, her nose has begun bleeding daily again. We have been keeping the doctors informed, but we have seen the tumor grow so rapidly before that it doesn't seem to warrant alarm. The oncologist said that it's of concern only if it gets to be as large as it was before the last round of chemo.

Well, it's going to be close. It's obvious now that chemo alone can only slow this tumor but cannot keep it contained. I'm starting to feel like this coming week we're going for a "band-aid" chemo treatment. What other damage is the tumor doing? Where else is it spreading while we buy a few more weeks? Initially we couldn't wait to see Robin start chemo. Now we can't wait to see her start radiation therapy! The doctors say the combination will possibly expel all signs of the tumor - so the surgery can focus simply on reconstruction!