This sucks.

 I am leaving hair everywhere.  It's there on my pillow now, its all over the place.  I watch my family sweetly pretend not to see it when it gets on their clothes and tangled into their fingers .  It probably seems to some people like I am torturing myself by watching and documenting the hair loss.  Why watch all my locks slowly fall out?  Wouldn't it just be easier to shave it all off?  Maybe.  But its mine.  It's my hair and it's my cancer and I am not ready to say goodbye to it yet.  If I want to comb it until there is one hair left then isn't that my prerogative?  Here is the really weird part, I want to keep it....I want to keep my hair in little baggies.  Okay, I'm not going to....but I want to.  I know that I am crossing into some serious Howard Hughes territory here but I promised to be honest!  I can see why women shave their heads before it starts to go, I can see how to them it feels like they are maintaining control but to me, right now, shaving my head feels like giving in.  I'm not ready to be bald, not yet, not this week.  But the showers are hard and brushing my hair sucks, it feels like cancer is slapping me in the face each time, taunting me with every stroke.

It's taking a huge tole on my attitude.  I am realizing how much of my identity and personality is tied into my looks.  It isn't even about how other people perceive me but about how good I feel when I think I look good.  I walk lighter, smile brighter, and want to make other people feel good too.  The medicine really kicked my butt this week, I had constant headaches, severe bone and nerve pain, nausea, and the list goes on.  You're not yourself when you're feeling sick and who wants to be around people when their feeling like death warmed up.  Also, I am coming to terms with the fact that I will not be able to work during this round of chemo, as hard as I tried to push through it and as much as my family needs the income I am just not able.  So I've lost my smile, my attitude sucks, and while my hair falls out I am going to let myself have a little pity party.  Cause it does suck, it really, really sucks.

Thankful

I wonder if by this time next week I will be bald, it is coming out faster everyday.  I shot this video today before chemo.  The hair falling out adds another element.  I have known it was coming and although I think and talk about it almost obsessively, having it actually beginning is making things a little too real.  So far I am holding it together but I think that is only because I still look normal, I want to look normal for as long as possible.  More for my son then anything else, I think it will be hard for him to see me not look like his mom.  He has been so sweet and almost parental in the way that he checks on me and nurtures me, it makes me insanely proud of the man that I am raising.  He's starting at a new school and I hate that I can't be the involved classroom mom that I am used to being.  I hate that I have to meet his teacher in this condition.  I don't want him to hear about his friends' grandparents that died from cancer, I don't want him to associate cancer with death.  I have been straight forward and honest with him about everything but I make sure that he knows emphatically that I am NOT dying.  Because I'm not, I can't.

This week was rough, my cancer is causing my family to go into survival mode.  A wise man, my daddy, said that "Change comes through conflict".  My world has changed and its made everybody around me shift too.  It isn't just me being impacted by my cancer, everyone I love has been handed their own bag of shit too.  There are so many people around me effected and having to alter their world to fit into mine.  I am completely amazed by my people, they are standing strong behind me from near and far.  My family, friends, clients, and even complete strangers have made sure that I know I am not doing this alone.  If you ever wanted to know how people really feel about you, just get cancer!  Not only do you find out that what matters but you also find out who matters.  It's profoundly humbling. 

I have been on my own since I was 17 and I take pride in taking care of myself and my family.  Now, I need help and I hate that I need help.  When somebody does something nice for you, you automatically want to reciprocate and right now I can't give back all that I am receiving.  I'm in awe of the generosity, kindness, and selflessness that people are offering.  I am learning to accept it without resistance, I am trying to see the beauty in their giving.  I know that I will be able to give back someday when the time is right but for now all I can do is say thank you.  Thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of you.  To my family who has dropped everything to fix me, my friends that make me laugh, and my clients for staying with me.  Thank you to every person who has given me words of kindness...thank you for altering your worlds...thank you for forcing your way in when my walls were up...for letting me be angry and loving me anyways...for being patient and giving me space...and for giving me the strength to do this.  I am thankful. 

Waiting...

Every morning when I wake up I look to see if there are clumps of hair laying on my pillow.  There never is.  I look for it when I take a ponytail down and every time I shower.  Still nothing.  I hear that when it goes, it goes quick.  I attached a video of a girl who documents her hair loss over 5 days, I must warn you it's pretty intense but it gives you an idea of why I am so anxious.  I told my doctor that I was determined to be the one girl who didn't lose her hair and she quickly informed me that the drugs that I am taking at the dose that I am receiving are going to make me bald.  There is no way around it, the hair WILL go but the question is when, everyone is different.  How long do I have left to feel pretty?

I love being a girl, I love to look sexy, and I love my hair.  I've always been a little chubby and I have never had great skin but I have always had good hair.  I am not saying that there isn't beauty in all of this because there is incredible beauty in the spirit and strength of a cancer patient.  There is a softness, a stillness and yet a level of bravery that comes from the deepest place within.  You can see it, they truly are beautiful.  But I want to be pretty.  I just do.  I make a living making people look good so I know first hand how much of a difference hair can make.  It really doesn't matter if everyone tells me I look gorgeous bald, I have to feel it and I know that I wont.

I want to be okay with it, I want to not be so angry.  At the root of it all I am just angry.  At everything.  It's not a "why me" anger but anger because of what this is taking from me.  Control is slipping through my fingers and I really need to be in control.  I am surrendering to this fully but that doesn't mean I'm happy about it.  I am miserable and it feels like I am making people around me miserable too.  I wish I could navigate through this flawlessly but I am not, it's a complete test of my character and it seems  like I am failing miserably.  Just like Alice falling through the rabbit hole, I am grasping at anything and everything that feels familiar.  So take your time little strands of mine, I welcome you to stay all long as you wish and maybe just maybe I will be that girl.

The Matrix

A big ass needle goes into my port before treatment. (a port is a surgically implanted device that deliverers my chemo into the main vein in my neck and down to my heart)

The joke is that every Wednesday I get plugged into The Matrix because really that is what all of this feels like.  I am now living in some alternate universe that doesn't seem anything like mine.  I have a port in my chest that gets connected to a machine that drips the highest legal dose of chemo.  It's at least a 5 hour process and I have to do this for a year.  A YEAR.  Being in The Matrix is the only way I can describe the fog that hovered over me during the first 3 weeks after my diagnosis.  I couldn't process the simplest of thoughts or tasks, I knew I had this wonderful life somewhere I just couldn't access it.  Someday when I am ready I will write about those first few days.  Thankfully, the fog is starting to lift and I am remembering to eat and clip my daughters fingernails.

The day that I found out that I had cancer should have been one of the happiest days of my life, it was the day we got the keys to our new house.  We had saved and scrimped for 3 years to buy the perfect house.  It was going to be a bit of a stretch financially but we are young, healthy, hard working, and wanted to have a house we could grow into.  Instead of being overjoyed I began to think about how I could give the house back.  Was it too late to say never mind?  We had just wired every penny of savings into escrow and now I had fucking cancer. Talk about timing.  Until then my whole brain had been consumed with the house buying process, I couldn't wait to hang curtains and swim in our new pool.  It's all I thought about, I had spent every night dreaming about where every piece of furniture would go.  Man was I passionate about that house.  So passionate that I would have divorced my husband over which wall the TV was going to hang on.  If he didn't like it then he didn't have to live there...I wish I was joking.

Fortunately, there is an amazing thing that happens the second you think you might be dying.  You instantly and involuntarily prioritize your life.  Who gives a crap where the couch goes?  It's this amazing gift that cancer handed me.  Now all I want to do is be in my house snuggled up to my husband, with or without a TV.  Okay, who am I kidding I totally have to have a TV.  As foggy as I felt I was clear about one thing and that is this: very little actually matters.  Reading my daughter "Duck on a Bike" for the one millionth time matters, having Netflix dates with my son actually matters.  I had convinced myself that ridiculous things like paint colors mattered, maybe as a way to entertain myself or maybe to make me feel less guilty about how charmed my life actually was.  The point is, IF I get to come out of this and be okay, if I get to live the rest of my life truly aware of what really matters then I am one lucky bitch.  And for that cancer, I thank you.

My dancing partner.

The TRUTH.

It appears as though proper protocol after a cancer diagnosis is to create a blog.  Here it is folks, everything I never wanted to talk about or think about for that matter is now laid before you.  I'm completely exposed.  I knew I couldn't do this unless I was completely real, 100% honest about how this feels.  First let me say that I am aware that there is no right thing to say to somebody who has been diagnosed with cancer and even if there was a right thing to say I would have inevitably taken it the wrong way.

When I was first diagnosed I searched feverishly for somebody like me.  I needed to relate on a level of realness, I had been humbled to the core and wanted somebody to just say how bad this sucks.  I found amazing stories of  brave women who laughed in the face of cancer, these women were incredibly inspiring yet they brought me no comfort.  There are these words associated with breast cancer, words like "survivor", "fighter", "warrior"....these words pissed me off.  I didn't feel strong, I felt like shit.  I cried until I had no more tears and screamed at the top of lungs until my ears were ringing.  I was horribly mean to the people who love me.  I knew I was going to die, I could feel it in my bones.  Every time I went to the doctor the news got worse, my cancer is bad and I can't get anybody to tell me if I get to see my 3 year old go to kindergarten.  I was pissed that my husband got to be healthy, how come he gets to watch our children grow up?  I have so many things I want to do still, I'm not even 30!  No more fluff, this cancer stuff blows and there is nothing I'd rather do less.  I'm so scared, I don't want to lose my hair, I don't want to lose my boobs, I don't want my eyelashes and eyebrows to fall out, I don't want to sit for 5 hours every Wednesday hooked up to a machine and have poison pumped through my body.  I just don't wanna.  But I do want to see my three year old go to kindergarten and I do want to see how insanely handsome of a man my son will be and I want to do all of it alongside my healthy husband.  Not because I am a survivor, fighter, or a warrior, but because I am too scared to die.  And that is okay, not everybody is equip at 29 to go through this gracefully, I for one am not. 

I am going to update this blog every Wednesday while I am plugged into the Matrix(a.k.a. CHEMO)and share every juicy detail of my journey.  So if you want to watch my hair fall out and like listening to me complain then follow me.