Bald Is Beautiful :)

We got good news on Monday!  The white blood cell boosting shot they gave me last week is working great, my counts quadrupled!  My platelet count has been slowly going down since chemo started, but it is still within limits so we will just continue to monitor.

I got distracted and didn't write on Monday because we got a piano keyboard!  It was perfect timing, because Tuesday was my first day on my own (my Mom flew back to her house some days ago and my husband was at work).  I napped a lot, and had a friend visit who taught be about piano chords, so it was a success.  Today I drove all by myself the 7 minutes to get to my local Starbucks and meet up with a friend.  It felt great to drive myself!

Really I'm just delaying what I wanted to write about...  Over the weekend I felt like my scalp was tingly.  My hair started falling off on Monday, but only a little bit.  We made sure to buy hair clippers at Target, to have them ready.  By Tuesday, it was obvious that it was falling off, but it wasn't too bad.  By this morning, I knew today was the day we would finally take the clippers to my hair.  It was obvious when hair was falling in my cereal without anything touching my head!  I mention using hair clippers instead of saying I will shave it off with a razor because chemo patients need to prevent cuts as much as possible.  This is what my hair looked like today, and also what my hand would look like if I so much as touched my scalp.

Armed with tips from my stylist friend (go against direction of hair growth, cut from bottom to top, go in all directions at the top to make sure it is even) - I sat in the patio while my husband took the hair off.  My daughter didn't love the process, I think she was scared the machine was hurting me and would kind of cry out.  We stopped a couple of times to reassure her that it was all ok.   At first she walked away from me with the short hair, but then I got hugs after she was able to touch the bald-ish head!

We started with a #4 cut, then went down in length.

I forgot to take a picture of the #2 cut, but here's the final result!  I thought I was going to have to hide it from my daughter, but she's doing just fine with it now.  I wore a hat when we went out to dinner with friends tonight, but ended up only wearing it into and out of the restaurant, I didn't feel self-conscious without the hat.  That's probably a credit to my awesome dinner companions, and to our waiter who thankfully didn't say anything about it.

So that is it!  I love not having to pick up hair from everywhere, and the hair follicles don't hurt now that the hair is so short.  I will need to remember to cover up even more when out in the Sun.  Don't I look like I'm ready to kick cancer's a$$?