Wigwam (Hair, Part 1)

Quitting my job as a TV news anchor and reporter was the perfect opportunity to test my belief that life is not all about hair. Novice steps at first, of course—a few minutes less with the blow dryer each morning, a couple of months without highlights—but by the time I was living on boats full time, I was indoctrinated, hair spray and salons supplanted by salt water and sailors. For over a year, nobody cut my hair except the captains I crewed for. I was a master, completely liberated from hair cares just in time to discover…

...it really is all about hair after all.

In the past two months, I’ve been confronted with a grave medical condition, threats to my mental state and emotional well-being, the early demise of my reproductive system, and, oh yeah, mortality, not to mention, given the compressed time frame to deal with all-of-the-above, probably shock.  What's left?  Hair.

What day will I start shedding? Does it get loose first? Like a tooth? Will I lose all of it? Eyebrows? Eyelashes? What about bikini waxing? How will being bald make my ass look? What does my scalp look like under there? What if I can’t get a wig to stay on straight? When will it grow back? Will this forever change the meaning of “bad hair day”? How long until everyone finally figures out that TV Blonde is not my natural color? These questions keep me up at night and then haunt my dreams when I finally do fall asleep.

Which, I suppose, is why I’m sitting in my hairdresser’s chair, obsessing over how to cut and style it, even though it’s all supposed to fall out in the next week or so. Just when I was starting to forget I have all these toxic chemicals running through my blood.

“How are you feeling?” asks Dr. R at our one-week-after-starting-chemo-how-are-you-feeling appointment.

I give him my standard response: “Great! That’s the right answer, right?”

He chuckles.

“Okay, seriously? All things considered, not too bad,” I say.

“Are you tired?”

“Yes.”

“Nauseous?”

“A little funky in the stomach, mostly in the morning.”

“Did you need the medication?”

“No.”

“Fever?”

“No.”

“Any pain?”

“No.”

“Are you feeling any other side effects?”

Yes. Restless. Caged. Angry. Trapped. I got an e-mail yesterday from Captain Kid, the young shipwright with whom I crossed the Atlantic last year. He and his girlfriend and the little boat are in Panama, waiting to go through the Canal, to sail the Pacific. On their horizon: The Galapagos, the Marquesas, New Zealand, freedom. And I’m scheduling chemo infusions? What was the question?

“Symptoms? Any other symptoms?”

“No. But I keep waiting for them. I keep looking in the mirror, expecting to see something weird.”

Dr. R thinks this is hilarious. Dr. R laughs at all my jokes. He has also called me twice this week, which makes me happy, but then he breaks the news that he and his wife are going to Florida next week, meaning even my oncologist isn’t available to be my chemo date. Dr. R promises his wingman, Dr. S, will take good care of me, and we make a date to look at all my CT and PT scans when he gets back in town. I can’t decide if this will be more or less fun than shopping for a wig.

Wig shopping is daunting. Who knew there were so many choices? Fake tresses range from about 25 bucks to thousands of dollars (the Website for one posh Manhattan salon has an entire page devoted to financing). Some insurance plans will cover a portion of the cost. Guess what they call it. Dr. R wrote me a prescription for a “cranial prosthesis.” I was so busy gasping at the terminology, I forgot to ask Dr. R if he prefers blondes or brunettes. Me, I’m thinking of going red. My fake-redhead girlfriend in St. John has offered to go fake-blonde “in order to keep balance in the universe.” See? Hair. Cosmically significant. Trust me. The fake-redhead is very spiritual.

To ease into what I’m sure is going to be a traumatic experience, I asked a former TV colleague to go hair shopping with me, “just for fun,” one Sunday afternoon about a week ago. She agreed, but warned she’d have to bring her 10-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter. Perfect! (“At least you know they’ll be honest,” remarked another girlfriend Sunday morning.) If nothing else, it’ll make a good story, I tell myself. This has been my rationale for many of the what-the-hell decisions in my life the past few years. Maybe I should make a note NOT to default to this approach when making health care decisions. (Four weeks of radiation when this chemo thing is over? Why not? Think of the material!)

Another co-worker whose Mom had breast cancer recommended a place called Wigwam. This is where I wanted to go because, come on, the name! I have to buy a wig at the Wigwam. What a great detail! Wigwam, sadly, is in Western Pennsylvania so we head to HAIRTOWN instead. It’s our lucky day. They’re having a wig sale! Right up front, there’s a whole table of wigs for $9.99 (NO TRY ON! warns a handwritten sign).  If nothing else, I can grab one on the way out.

TV Reporter Friend marches to the display in the back of the store with her little girl and me trailing behind. (Her son stays in the SUV with his Game Boy, or whatever it is kids play with these days.) It takes me 20 minutes to work up the nerve to try something on, but the other two jump right in. TV Reporter Friend has donned a long, blonde hippie wig that she thinks makes her look like a South Jersey girl on the way to a rock concert. “Atco Meets The Allman Brothers” she calls it. Her precocious daughter, meanwhile, has a black stocking cap pulled tight over her 8-year-old locks, accenting the impish face beneath. She is following me around, shaking her head at everything I touch. “Not that one. Nope. Not that either. Here, try this!”

“What do you think of this?” asks TV Reporter Friend. She’s got a sexy, black bob now. Her daughter giggles. “I want to play a joke on Daddy,” she explains.

I try on the kid’s pick: Reddish-brown, waist-length, straight with bangs. We decide I look like Lindsay Lohan, but it’s not a bad match for my face. The 8-year-old’s got a good eye. I’m not ready to commit, so I ask her to help me choose something from the $9.99 table. We settle on a long and curly strawberry blonde number. I pay, walk out to the parking lot, and try on the wig. I adjust my black shades, toss my messy mane, and whip around to check out my reflection in the storefront. Wow! A pair of stilettos and I’m ready for my close-up with Client #9.

“You look beautiful!” gushes the 8-year-old.

Kids are easy.

We get back in the car, where the 10-year-old glances at me, expressionless, for a second before returning to his game.

“Mom,” he sighs, “Is Margie going to be with us ALL afternoon?”

No. Margie has to test out this wig thing with another audience. Like the one in the Superfresh. I have to pick up dessert on my way to dinner at another friend’s house, so decide to keep the hair for now. Despite the bed head, with sneakers, sweatpants, and dark sunglasses, I think I look less like a hooker, more like a B-movie actress with a hangover, but even that’s out of place at a grocery store in suburban Philadelphia. I’m sure that guy in dairy is staring. All those people in the checkout line, too. Nobody says anything, though (who would dare?) so I stand up straighter, smile, and notice that their hair doesn’t look all that great either.

I wear my hair to dinner. “This one’s just for fun,” I announce to my friend. “It’s not bad!” she laughs. Her kids stare at me suspiciously over spaghetti and meatballs. They think I look like Hannah Montana.

Truth be told, I’m happy with Hannah or Lindsay. I’d like to think I’d be okay with scarves, hats, alter-egos, and maybe even au naturel, but I really do need a decent wig because, and here’s the irony: I’m back on TV! I’m hosting one of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s live performances on April 10. Most people lose their hair three weeks after their first treatment, which for me is… April 8. Seven years after quitting TV, I am going to be on TV—in high-definition—two days after I lose my hair. How did this happen?

I am still clinging desperately to strands of the It’s-Not-All-About-Hair philosophy. I want to be a true believer, I really do. I haven’t given up the faith yet; but like any thinking believer, I do keep questioning it.

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Cancer is HILARIOUS

I have just one last question before we get started:  “Are you SURE I have this?” I ask the doctor.

Because I still don’t feel sick. And I don’t look sick. And the drugs they are about to push through my veins for the rest of this godforsaken afternoon are going to make me sick. And because this is the moment.

After two months of health care hell—the countless doctor visits, seven needle biopsies, two CAT scans, two mammograms, two Pap smears, heart tests, lung tests, blood tests, a skin check, consults with two medical oncologists, a radiation oncologist, and a fertility specialist, not to mention the PET scan that left me temporarily radioactive (“Don’t go near any babies or pregnant women tonight!”)—this is the one moment I can’t seem to handle. Every time I have tried to visualize the instant when they will stick a needle in me and start pumping poison through my body, I break down.

No matter how I try, I cannot get my head around the idea that I have to give them permission to give me this stuff that’s going to ravage my body. Side effects of the “cure” range from nausea and hair loss to lung damage, heart failure and, my favorite, other cancers. Suggested remedies for some of the less insidious possibilities run the gamut from crowd avoidance to bad footwear. Wear sensible, rubber-soled shoes? For how long? The four hours I’m getting the chemo? A couple days after? The entire time I’m undergoing treatment?

Samantha would have scoffed at that last piece of advice. When the Sex and the City character gets breast cancer, all her well-heeled pals accompany her to chemo, fashionably dressed and full of jokes. When the nurse expresses her surprise to hear so much laughter, Samantha smiles and declares: “Cancer’s hilarious!”

My surgeon friend Dr. Lisa was recounting this scene last month while we were in the pre-op holding room at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, waiting for me to be wheeled in for my biopsy. The OR was running hours behind schedule but Lisa, having done her residency at Jeff, had been permitted to accompany me past the point where you’re normally allowed to have visitors. I had comfort and entertainment.

“Surgery is hilarious, too,” said Dr. Lisa.

“As hilarious as cancer?”

The OR nurse adding something to the chart on my gurney looked up, stared at each of us, then walked out of our space without saying a word. Lisa, with a flourish, whipped the privacy curtain closed around us, creating the illusion of walls, and we burst into giggles. With no apologies to those within earshot, the irreverent improv continued.

“My friend the anesthesiologist should be in soon. Anesthesia. Now that’s hilarious. Gotta keep laughing, Marge.”

The Doctor half of Dr. Lisa gives great advice. Besides encouraging me to engage in shoe shopping in lieu of Googling on the day I got my preliminary diagnosis, she also confirmed that in the DRINK ONLY CLEAR LIQUIDS PRIOR TO SURGERY instruction on my surgery prep sheet, “clear liquids” absolutely did include gin and vodka. (“Just don’t go to the OR wasted!”)

Dr. Lisa is working in Miami now but flew up to see me through the first part of my ordeal. Her former colleagues in the Ear, Nose and Throat department cut the tissue sample out of the golf ball-sized lump in my neck, and Lisa arranged for a plastic surgeon friend to sew it up so I wouldn’t have a scar, which is the last thing I would have thought of. In retrospect, I think a scar accenting my décolletage might be sexy but Lisa, who always looks like she just stepped out of some chic, Paris boutique, had other ideas.

Back to the present and Dr. R, my new doctor—the “cancerologist” my island friend Celia calls him—is patiently explaining, like we haven’t been over this a dozen times, that the pathology and PET scan all confirm Hodgkin’s. The chemo will make it go away.

The oncology nurse gives me Tylenol and Benadryl, taps the veins up and down my arm, and starts the IV. The first thing I get is anti-nausea medication. Not too scary.

The fact that I don’t have symptoms—the reason I don’t feel sick—is a good sign, Dr. R reassures me. “Good” is a relative term in medicine. Consider this message, a week after the surgery, from Dr. Lisa:

“Marge! I just talked to the pathologist. It’s Hodgkin’s. That’s good. Happy Valentine’s Day! Call me!”

There would be a lot of these weird pronouncements in the following weeks.

“We’ve been praying for the Hodgkin’s, honey,” chirps my 90-year-old Great Aunt Betty over the phone. “I know it sounds funny to say, but if you have to have cancer, this one’s a good one.”

Her daughter, who works at the local high school, picks up the extension. “We have a couple students who had it, and they’re all doing great now,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going on, but everybody’s got this lymphoma now, hon. And who knows, maybe you’ll meet a handsome doctor!”

So there you go. I’ve got Hodgkin’s lymphoma which is apparently both “Good News!” and HILARIOUS, as my girlfriends have now adopted this as our mantra.

My hilarious childhood friend Cynthia has taken to sending me e-mails like this:

To: msmargarita
From: Cyn
Subject: HILARIOUS List of Doctors

Below are notes and links for doctors at various hospitals. Recommendations are based on experiences with the doctors rather than on outcome, since outcome is based on diagnosis, and Hodgkin’s is hilarious.

Doctor X treated my brother’s friend for Hodgkin’s. She’s been in full remission for some time, thus proving that Hodgkin’s is hilarious.

FYI, you need copies of your CT scans when you go to another hospital for consult and it can take a few days to copy the CT scan onto CD. I’m not sure how many days it takes to add the U2 musical accompaniment to the CD.

I hope you found this list to be hilarious.

Love,
Cyn

P.S. There’s a general number for cancer-related questions: 1-800-4-CANCER. With cancer in the phone number, this question line must be hilarious.

Despite his office being on the 13th floor (even the 13 button in the elevator is perversely tilted), I have chosen Dr. R as my medical oncologist. He has qualities I like in a man, i.e. he is smart, and thinks I’m funny, and is nice to my friends, and seems willing to put up with my shit (but only to a point). That’s not why I picked him, though. I picked him because he agrees with me that the whole chemo thing is creepy (“Here’s my office, not too creepy,” he said while giving me a tour my first day, “and over here is the infusion room which is, yeah, pretty creepy…”) and he’s promised to try to get me through 4-6 months of treatment without having a port surgically placed in my chest or my arm. Oh, and also because when he extracted a hunk of bone marrow from my hip, it didn’t hurt all that much.

“Wow, it’s just like osso bucco!” said my city friend Ellen, when I showed her the sliver floating in a little vial of liquid. Ellen, dressed in black fur coat and high black boots, accessorized with red handbag and lipstick, had come to escort me home, as I had been told the bone marrow aspiration would leave me doubled over in pain. Since I feel fine, we go to happy hour instead. Ellen, who’s sticking to her opinion that a week at Canyon Ranch will do me more good than chemo, is even more hilarious than cancer.

Dr. Lisa, meanwhile, is back in Miami, but checks in often. Cancer is still a hot topic but, as it is not her specialty, a healthy percentage of our conversation has returned to traditional favorites, such as men. Sometimes the two topics overlap:

Dr. Lisa: “Who are you taking with you for your first day of chemo?”

Me: “Not sure. My Mom and a few friends in Philly have offered, but I’m afraid they’re going to cry. I can’t take anymore crying!”

Dr. Lisa: “Marge! You need more non-criers in your life!”

Me: “I’ve got plenty. You just all happen to live in other cities.”

Dr. Lisa: “Wait! You know who would be PERFECT? That boy you liked who took you to dinner last week and then never called again, even to see how you were feeling. He definitely wouldn’t cry. THAT guy’s fucking heartless.”

Me: “He’d be a great chemo date. Why didn’t he call me?”

Dr. Lisa: “Maybe he’s mad that you didn’t ask him to be your sperm donor.”

The oncology nurse has now come over to change the IV, to start infusing the first of four chemo drugs I will get. “This one is the Bleomycin,” she explains. Which one is that? I try to remember. The one that will make me sterile and possibly put me in full-blown menopause—at age 42—by next week? Or just the one that will turn my pee fluorescent orange?

I consult my reference materials, skipping over What You Need To Know About Hodgkin’s Disease, last updated in the nineties. Has there really been nothing added to the list of things one needs to know in the last 10 years? The plethora of frightening and suspect information provided in a .13 second Google search begs to differ. Moving on to user-friendly Chemotherapy and You, I find my drug cheat sheet. Possible side effects of Bleomycin: Fever and chills, faintness, confusion, sweating, wheezing, lung problems, mouth sores, swelling of fingers, vomiting…

Dr. R comes in to check on me.

“Your reading material is depressing,” I inform him.

He agrees. “Don’t read it.”

I had tried to find alternatives, stopping at the bookstore a few days ago in search of one of the few humorous books about cancer I had seen online, but the shelves at my local Barnes and Noble were stocked with serious fare. Leafing through one paperback that appeared to be a bit on the light-hearted side, I opened to a page where I read the sentence: “Let’s face it. There is nothing funny about cancer.” I slammed the book shut, bolted from the store and went shoe shopping (again), purchasing two pairs of killer heels and new sneakers. I hate running, but have a sudden urge to…run.

The oncology nurse is back. While I’ve been typing, the first drip has finished. It went well which is good news (!) because if it accidentally seeped out of my veins, it would cause tissue damage. Now she’s got the next two drugs—Adriamycin and Vinblastine. They get pushed directly into my vein through a syringe.

So far I haven’t cried, and I haven’t even had to force myself to think about all those cancer kids at Children’s Hospital that we used to do stories on all the time when I was a TV reporter in Philadelphia, all those kids and families who clearly have it so much worse than I do, for whom cancer is—duh—not hilarious at all.

I watch the nurse hook up the last bag, the Dacarbazine, the one that can hurt going in and might need to be diluted, which would take longer, but be more comfortable. Don’t forget to let her know if I feel any pain.

“Just think of it as intravenous Irish Whiskey,” a friend e-mailed this morning.

It’s going to be a hell of a hangover.

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Fish Gotta Swim...

February 29, 2008

Between lunchtime and happy hour, the situation went from daunting to dire.

Over quiche and salad at the Caribou Café, I had been joking that I needed to find a boyfriend before my hair falls out. Now, apparently, I may have to secure a sperm donor by noon on Tuesday.

Maybe I should back up.

Things started going to hell six weeks ago, when a doctor in the U.S. Virgin Islands told me I was turning into a fish.

Okay, that’s not exactly what he said. It was something more on the lines of “that lump in your neck might be a branchial cleft cyst which is essentially residual gill-like tissue left over from the embryonic days before your lungs were fully formed,” but I stopped listening after “gill.” Three years after trading in my “real job” in Philadelphia for a waitressing gig in the islands, followed by a year of adventures on the high seas, was my body finally morphing into something saltwater-based, like a mermaid? What a great ending for my book! Even better than crossing the Atlantic in a 30-foot sailboat.

Promising to see a specialist when I returned to the States in a few days, I walked out of the medical office into an 80-degree-and-sunny, postcard-perfect tropical scene. Spirits boosted by two of Whitey’s Bloody Marys at JJ’s bar by the ferry dock, I bought a new bikini (spending more than I did on the doctor) then went sailing with my island friend Celia in her new boat. My biggest worry that balmy afternoon was that I had colored my hair a few shades too dark, Deep Moonlight being the closest thing to blonde I could find in the drugstore in the West Indies. Celia assured me I looked great as a brunette. If, in fact, I did turn into a fish, under her mooring in St. John’s Chocolate Hole would be a nice place to live.

The doctor, unfortunately, was wrong about the gills. Turns out it was just cancer. Not the kind that kills you (at least not 70-95 percent of the time, depending on which statistics you’re reading), just the kind that land locks you and makes you sick for awhile and mostly is a colossal pain in the ass, ruining your plans to work on a yacht in the Caribbean and keep traveling to exotic places.

This, by the way, is how you find out:

You make an appointment at a prestigious teaching hospital in a major East Coast city. You see a couple of stone-faced receptionists, then a medical technician, then a nurse, then a student who looks about 14, then a physician’s assistant. Then, when you are out in the hallway, yelling into your cell phone that apparently there ARE NO actual DOCTORS in this prestigious institution on this particular day, someone makes a call and then hands you the name and address of the ear, nose and throat specialist in the next building. Six hours later, the chairman of the ENT department looks at your neck for 90 seconds, a couple of pathologists stick your lump with a whole bunch of needles, then the top dog comes back in and cheerfully announces, “Good news! It looks like lymphoma!”

This is a little confusing, because your surgeon friend, Dr. Lisa, told you good news would be “a reactive lymph node,” which sounds kind of the same, but isn’t exactly what you think you just heard from this specialist guy who has now launched into this hazy string of words that includes “surgery,” “chemo,” “radiation,” and “not a death sentence.”

“Makes you glad you didn’t get the ‘bad news,’” a friend would later remark.

Because the specialist never says the word “cancer,” I am still confused when I walk out of his office into the gray, bitterly cold, Philadelphia winter afternoon. Tears freezing on my cheeks, I dial Dr. Lisa who, in her take-charge voice, confirms what I think I heard, agrees that perhaps “good news” is not the best way to describe my preliminary diagnosis and assures me that what I have is very treatable.

“Do NOT go home and Google anything,” she orders. “Go shoe shopping. I’ll call you later.”

“You’ll be fine,” echoes a co-worker. “This is just a speed bump in your life. And in the end, it might be one of those things that make you re-evaluate what’s really important.”

Was he kidding? Wasn’t anybody paying attention? I had already quit a high profile, well-paying job, sold my car, sublet my condo, put my belongings in storage and completely upended my hard-earned Stable Life in search of What’s Really Important. Re-evaluate life? Check! Already crossed off the list! There must be better candidates for forced introspection.

“Besides, I feel great!” I protest to my city friend Ellen over green tea martinis (those are healthy, right?) later that night. “How can there be anything wrong with me?”

“You don’t have cancer, honey,” replies Ellen. “What you need is a week at a spa. Give me that doctor’s phone number. He needs to send you to Canyon Ranch. And your insurance should pay for it.”

Back at lunch at the café, my dining companion asks if I read about Smith magazine’s six-word memoir contest. The winner, Not Quite What I Was Planning, could apply to me, but we try to think of something original. We settle on: Bring It On, Baby. What’s Next?

I leave laughing, but walking home in the new, high-heeled, black leather boots purchased on diagnosis day, my heart is sinking. Not quite what I was planning? How about: “How fucked up is this?” I don’t need six words. “This sucks.” Two words suffice. “Not fair.” I am quite the wordsmith. Is this what people mean when they say, “This will give you plenty to write about”? My old material was better.

“Chemotherapy will make you sterile,” the radiation expert told me last week. “Do you want information on egg harvesting before starting treatment?”

Really, you shouldn’t get cancer until you get a husband. I love my mother, but the fact that I’m 42 and still have to put her down as my emergency contact person is, frankly, depressing. On top of everything else, I have to revisit this baby thing? Does anybody believe now would be a good time to undergo the hormone therapy needed to boost egg production?

The first meltdown is thorough.

“Pour a glass of wine!” Celia demands, her voice crackling over the phone 1500 miles away.

“I don’t have anything here,” I despair, “except the bottle of Patrón I bought for my friend’s tequila party tonight.”

“Open it! They won’t care if you have your share a little early.”

I break the green seal, uncork the bottle, and fill a shot glass to the brim. It is warm going down.

“Okay, I’ve never done shots alone before,” I say.

“So what?” says Celia. “Besides, you’re not alone. I’m drinking too.”

One hour and a couple of shots later, I am rallying. Before hanging up, we toast:

“I’d rather be Patrónal than hormonal!” (Six words.)

The medical oncologist told me if I can get drunk without puking, then chemo probably won’t make me sick. She appeared impressed when I assured her I could hold my liquor in 20-foot seas. It seems the responsible thing to do, keeping up my tolerance while stuck on land. Especially since it’s this so-called solid ground that feels a little shaky.

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