Shaving my head.....

When I got sick the first thing that I associated with the word cancer was losing my hair. For me losing my hair was something I wasn’t excited about, for the longest time I always thought I had an oddly shaped head and little gouiders all over it? Was I scared to lose my hair, no, was I excited to lose my hair, absolutely not, was it something that I thought about often. What was it going to be like bald? What would I look like? Its winter time, am I going to get cold easier? Will the ladies like it? Will the ladies love it? Maybe they’ll hate it. Those were things that I thought about. I had a lot of time on my hands to think about these things. When I started chemo I thought it was just going to happen right away, the day I started chemo I thought that would be the day my hair would start falling out. It wasn’t, every day I would ask my nurse if today was the day that my hair would fall out. Most of my nurses would just smile and say no, without an explanation. Well damn it I wanted an explanation, when is this shit on the top of my head going to start falling out, answers people I want answers. Until I finally stopped one of my lovely nurses in there smiling way of say not today Troy, and said wait, explain this to me, when will my hair fall out? Finally I get an answer, I was told that my hair wouldn’t fall out until a week or so after I finished my chemo, ahhh to have some sort of idea when I would lose my lushes locks was a relief. I finished chemo and then it was a waiting game, day after day I would see if my hair was falling out, it wasn’t. One day I was running my hand through my lovely locks and sure enough I noticed on my hand a couple strands of my hair, so I’d do it again, and again, hair coming out every time, at first it wasn’t a lot, nothing special. A couple of days later I did the same thing, got the same result, ran my hand through my hair and hair was still falling out, so it wasn’t a fluke. At this point it is becoming more and more hair each day, it’s now being left on my pillow from just laying there, and now I like to show off to my guests, hey check this out, and I could just pull out a lump of my own hair and throw it on the floor. I thought it was so cool, my hair was just falling out, just like that, and a stiff breeze could have taken some hair out at this point. There comes a time when your hair falls out so much that you have to make the decision to finally get rid of it.

I made the call to a couple of friends that I knew would have the right tools, and discussed the possibility of them coming up to the hospital to shave my head. Apparently shaving your head is a big deal, my friends were excited my sisters and Becky(Girlfriend) were excited, I didn’t know it was going to be such a hit, I mean I was losing my hair, no one knew what I was going to look like when I shaved my head. So I had to ask my nurse what I could use and what I couldn’t use to make this happen, they said just don’t cut yourself, I could handle that, considering I wouldn’t be the one actually doing the cutting. On a midweek evening it was time, Becky, my sisters, and a couple buddies, Andy and Haas came up to the hospital to do the deed. It was like a game to them, each one took a turn with a scissors to cut off some of the most beautiful hair they had ever seen, and watch it float to the floor like a feather. There I was in my hospital room, with friends, family and a few nurses as my witness’s shaving my head. For those of you that may not know me too well, my hair was kind of my thing, in high school I had what some called, “hockey hair”, there was a picture of me in the local Northfield News paper of me with the longest hair I had ever had, I was a pretty site. After everyone took their turn cutting my hair, it was time to part ways with the locks, so as I sat in the chair with a garbage bag over my head, with a hole for my head obviously, we shaved it.

To my amazement it didn’t look all that bad, the look grew on me, and over time it was just me. It’s funny what shaving your head means in the whole scheme of cancer. At first when you still have your hair and you’re doing chemo, it doesn’t really seem real, I mean you get sick every once in awhile; you have a lot of time to think about things. Shaving your head, well shaving your head makes everything real. You’ve reached the point where the fact that you have cancer becomes you. It’s not just something you’re sick with, it now is you, and every time you look at yourself in the mirror you have a reminder that you’re sick, you’ve lost your hair and you’re in a fight for your life.

It’s funny, none of this really got to me like it may have someone else, I knew I was sick, I knew I was in a fight, but it was a fight that I wasn’t afraid of, I wasn’t afraid of it because I knew I would win.