Cancer is Crap: Bad Blogger, Bad Dream
DECEMBER 15 2009, 1:20 PM
Sorry I have been a delinquent blogger, but there have been some developments, ah, developing, and since they’re not yet fully developed I thought it better to wait before I blogged about them.
How’s that for crypto-babble?
Anyway, in the mean time, allow me to exorcise this demon dream I had last night about losing my hair again. I went through each step – the knowledge that it was going to fall out, the buzz cut, waking up to a pillow full of hair, and finally, rubbing out the last vestiges of it and turning to face the mirror, seeing myself bald again. It was so real and so devastating that I woke up choking back tears.
Sometimes people say “it’s only hair!” and that losing it is a small price to pay for saving your life. I think they should perhaps shave their heads and their eyebrows and pluck out their eyelashes and acquire a life-threatening disease before they say that.
Because when you’re sick and fighting it, looking in the mirror and seeing cancer staring back at you is a hard thing to face, day after day.
That vision of a you that isn’t really you — the hairlessness that is cancer, not choice — can be a devastating and powerful psychological force. And yet somehow we face it, millions of us. It’s not the worst thing in the world, I admit, but it’s a horror all the same.
