Beard redux

 I told you it was in its way back. So after a late-life reprise of puberty I am dumped back into Dubliners-style facial decoration. Well, maybe less Ronnie Drew, and more Hoxton hipster (aka HT).

For three months after they injected the Melphalan, hair either fell out or just stopped growing. All kinds of bits of hair went missing, but strangely my eyebrows carried on being as Healey/Brezhnev as ever. A friend of mine lost eyebrows and even *eyelashes* in her chemo. Which makes it rubbish when it rains because all the water goes straight into your eyes.

The hair on my head got really white and weedy under chemo, so when it started growing back in it's normal colour I had a strange sheep-like set of downy curls on tip of my normal Barnet. So the other day I asked Angie to trim the sheepy excrescences on my locks and now everything is pretty much as it was. And as I now won't be having another stem cell transplant, it should all stick around for a long time (barring baldness). 

I do, while saying all this, understand that hair loss can be absolutely the hardest thing to take for some chemo patients. It just wasn't something that bothered me personally. Other side-effects were harder for me. But if you have a clear idea of what you should look like, or if you are proud of your appearance hair and all, the fact that treatment for cancer will take all that away from you can be horrible. Like adding insult to injury. Not all chemo drugs make you lose your hair, but a lot of the strongest ones do. One of my cancer buddies has always had short hair, which led some of her medical staff to think that she'd be less bothered at any hair loss. But as she said "You don't know how much it costs to keep it looking like this. Yes, I want to keep it!"

But for me I admit it's been more of a 'hair today, gone tomorrow, back in three months' experience and is now over. And the next bit of treatment starts tomorrow.