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MARCH 17. FIRST HAIRCUT OF THE YEAR
- University of Iowa Press
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55 will come so you have to be ready for it. I let him talk. I made comments . He told me he’d loan me some dvds. He said, Now we’ll have to visit you in the hospital. I said, I’m already out. They didn’t keep me long. I told him sort of vaguely, I think, that I knew cancer was scary for him but that it seemed like mine was caught early and that I would be OK, that a lot of people survive breast cancer. His twin died of cancer, his father has ms. His life has been full of loss, if that’s not oxymoronic. Jesse was in the hospital on Halloween when they were 12, and I went trick-or-treating with Seth. He was on the cusp of being too old. We went to Alta Vista Terrace, a nearby block of historic row houses. We both liked it. I got to feel like I had a child. He got to feel like he had a parent with him. Once, months later, I was in the car with the boys and Barry, and Jesse was talking about a camp he was going to for kids with cancer. Seth said, I wish I had cancer. Jesse said, No you don’t. MARCH 17. FIRST HAIRCUT OF THE YEAR Cancer Bitch went for her $60 haircut Friday with trepidations and a ruler so that she could send 10 inches of hair to Locks of Love, though it’s a controversial outfit. (In 2002, it supposedly gave out fewer than 200 wigs and collected hundreds of thousands of dollars.) She came back with a more sophisticated haircut and nothing for Locks of Love. The haircut will get her used to seeing her own face. Hairdressers always say this: Now you can see your face. It was a one-person salon less than a mile straight south of me, on a street with restaurants and houses and a liquor store. The owner has long Afro-Korean hair made up of little curly waves. It was tied back. She was very friendly, and when I told her about my plan to cut my hair progressively shorter, she told me about her mother’s cervical cancer. Amazingly, she’d been treated well and successfully at the county hospital. The stylist did not approve of what she called my “umbrella cut,” which I’ve had for many years. I never saw anything wrong with having hair that got progressively wider on its way to my shoulders. 56 Her strategy was to make a diamond cut, which means that the hair would be wider on the sides than the bottom. She measured the strands before she cut it and said to forget the ruler, she’d just give me a good cut. The pieces on the floor were about four inches long. So I won’t be donating my hair. Maybe it’s just an excuse, but I’m not sure how effective any of the wig programs are anyway. Wigs for Kids’ finances weren’t audited by a cpa. I can’t find an evaluation for Beautiful Lengths. I think my hair looks good. It’s curly all over. At its longest, it’s a few inches below my ears. Chemo starts Monday, March 26. MARCH 19. COVERING Yesterday and today I spent too much time on the web looking at chemo-head headgear. I don’t like most turbans and scarves out there and I would want to try them on anyway before buying them. I did send off for temporary tattoos for the scalp from an outfit I found called ChemoChicks.com. The medium is henna and the design is a swirling leaf pattern. I also ordered eyebrow stencils. A girl has to plan. Sharon has agreed to apply the henna. She has an mfa in art so she should be able to integrate a peace sign with the leaves. MARCH 20. GENDER: HIDING THE EVIDENCE When I went for the scan to see if my heart was up to snuff for chemo, I wore the mastectomy camisole under a red flannel button-down shirt of Linc’s. I didn’t wear earrings because I thought I’d have to take them off in the scanner. I looked in the mirror and thought I looked androgynous. This is the abiding mystery: Why do we need to know someone ’s gender? I remember in the days of...