HAKUNA MATATA

HAKUNA MATATA

What a wonderful phrase 

It means no worries

For the rest of your days. 

This is my mantra. It has to be. If not, well, I would be deep down in the holes of despair. 

I know I’ve used this photo before but I wanted to remind you how I looked when I started chemo. 

A few things that need to be talked about today are things you just have to know about when it comes to chemo.  

Let’s start with hair loss. It doesn’t just start happening with your first round. That’s because your body is saying, “what the hell are you doing to me? I’ll forgive you this time”. You start brushing your hair and a few strands come out like they normally would. 

Then comes your second round. Your body says, “hey, I thought we talked about this!!!”  You start noticing a little more hair coming out now. But you just tell yourself, phew, that’s not too bad. 

And then, after round three, dun dun dun, your body says, “buckle up buttercup, you are in for a ride.” You brush your hair and all of a sudden you have a huge softball size mound of hair in your hand!  With everything I’ve gone through in the past two years at this point, this is the first time I broke down crying. All day crying. Go through a whole box tissue crying. You have a huge scar on your body from your transplant, which you don’t cry about, but losing your hair puts you in a tailspin. 

I had my daughter-in-law come over and cut it closer to my head. Figured I wouldn’t continue crying if I was losing short pieces of it at a time.

Here are some photos of my continued journey of the loss. 

This is my brother Phillip. I posted about his trip to see me in my previous post, “C The DIFFerence A Week Makes”. I’m sure when he visited me this day at home he was taken aback by my hair loss. I myself was taken aback that he had more hair than me. 

You continue losing more hair until you are finished with treatment. Then it comes back in but not all over your head. A few here and there. It takes longer than you think to get a glorious head of hair again.  Good times. 

Let’s go on to some something you might not know. When you lose your hair, you also lose your nose hair. I know right, I had no idea. So if your nose runs, there is NO HAIR in there to stop it from streaming out of your nose. I had to start shoving tissue up my nose. 

I actually went to an appointment with my liver doctor looking like this one day. This is the day I learned the BREAKING NEWS. There is an item like this 

WHAT THE?  A nose tampon?  Why have I never heard of these before? They actually will use them for patients that get nosebleeds because their platelets are extremely low. I never had a bloody nose.  My platelets got super low, but not extreme. It isn’t uncommon to see other patients in their chairs getting platelets or blood transfusions. 

I might have to invest in some nose tampons because even a year later I get bad runny nose syndrome. I made up that it’s a syndrome, but it’s my blog so I can say what I want. 

Stay tuned next week for more interesting and amusing facts.