Though I Have Seen My Head (Grown Slightly Bald)

I sat in Taylor’s chair in the high-ceilinged hair salon on Madison Avenue, watching all the wealthy Upper East Siders, as they rested their five-figure handbags on velvet stools like beloved pets. My newfound sense of mortality had no place in this land of excess. This was the room T.S. Eliot must have been referring to when he spoke about the “women [who] come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.”

As Taylor and I made small talk, I casually broached the subject of hair loss. She said with a laugh, “I don’t think anything could cause you to lose your hair. You have way too much of it.” Her words fell like a thousand knives piercing my skin.

Take my breasts, but please, please spare my hair, I prayed to no one in particular.

I was desperate. A wig would not provide me with the kind of coverage I needed. I couldn’t let the world know my malignant little secret. I couldn’t withstand the sympathy sure to follow.

My cryo-capper, Faye was the answer to my prayers. A cryo-capper is a person who wraps the head of a chemo patient during treatments in a turban of ice changed every twenty minutes. The “turban” freezes out the toxic chemicals meant to kill off any fast-dividing cells in the body, including hair follicles.

I say desperate because you truly need to be desperate to cryocap. It is painfully cold, worse than the worst ice cream headache. It adds four and six hours to every chemo session. And the worst part is, it doesn’t work well. At best, you can hope to keep seventy-five percent of your hair, if you follow all the rules including not washing your hair more than once a week, treating your hair with apple cider vinegar, never standing directly under a shower head, and making a sustained effort to avoid sweating at all costs. This was all next-to-impossible for a young mother experiencing simultaneous postpartum and chemo-induced hot flashes in a sweltering New York City summer. 

But I had to try. The cumbersome protocol was nothing compared to the unfathomability of shedding my disguise.

With Faye’s help, and hours upon hours of sitting on my chemo throne wearing a heavy crown of ice, I withstood this torture. It gave new meaning to the phrase there can be no beauty without pain. This is coming from a woman who underwent a double mastectomy three weeks after childbirth.

And so, I suffered while Faye repeatedly stuck her hands into the tundra of the freezer chest, grabbing new packs of ice to gently wrap around my head. Negative forty degrees Fahrenheit. Ice packs needed to be kept at negative forty degrees Fahrenheit. I sat there in humiliated silence while she examined my head for thinning or balding areas, covering them with cheesecloths to protect my newly exposed skin from frostbite.

Living at the intersection of greed and vanity in New York City for the past seven years, I was used to, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “prepar[ing] a face to meet the faces that I meet,” but this was the opposite. There was no time to prepare a face for this. 

I was less passive when Faye tried to cover me with a blanket or helped me shuffle into my shoes as I weakly dragged my IV pole to the bathroom. I snapped at her when she dimmed the lights upon seeing the weariness on my face. I didn’t want to be rendered any more vulnerable. Before the metamorphosis, I used to see vulnerability as weakness. I had not yet come out the other end.

Being a skeptic (or perhaps embittered as a result of working in Corporate America for the past eight years), I was skeptical of Faye’s kindness. But it seemed this was her calling. She told me she too once worked in Corporate America. After becoming disenchanted with the meaninglessness of it all, she read the book Designing Your Life. This is where it led her. 

Unlike the doctors or nurses, she did not save people’s lives. She saved their dignity. In many ways, this was far more difficult. We have proven evidence-based methods for saving people’s lives, but much less is known about how to save them from the loss of personhood that almost always accompanies life-threatening illness. 

How do you tell a thirty-three-year-old mother of two it is okay she is losing her hair? That even when she looks in the mirror and sees a swollen Fraggle, it could always be worse. Her husband will still find her beautiful, even when forced to clean clumps of her hair from the shower drain. Her babies will not be traumatized when they pull on mommy’s hair and find it in their little, sweaty palms. The torture she is experiencing will be worth it. She is not dying, even when her very own hair follicles desert her. This too shall pass. 

I felt more exposed when Faye gently removed my headband than I ever felt when the doctors and nurses disrobed me to feel my chest where my breasts used to be. Underneath my clothes, I knew I was broken. But I needed to preserve my hair to prevent the brokenness from leaking out for everyone to see. 

In the days leading up to each treatment, my anxiety increased as I imagined Faye carefully caressing my scalp, inspecting the damage wrought by the last chemo session. My pulse raced as I sensed her fingers approaching my head. J. Alfred Prufrock’s words played on a loop in my mind: They will say: “How [her] hair is growing thin!” If Prufrock was upset about losing his hair, imagine how I must feel. He was an old man.

As I let Faye further and further into my hair loss, I also let her into my life. My husband and I regaled her with stories of how we met and the chaos of dealing with our two babies at home. Finally, I no longer recoiled when she covered me with a blanket. I accepted her offer to bring me a glass of water. 

Returning to the Upper East Side, a year and a lifetime later, I steeled myself for the reign of judgment I feared would accompany my first trip back to the hairdresser A.C. (coincidentally, the name of both the harsh chemo regimen that caused my hair loss and the acronym for After Cancer). Gone was the shield of luscious, brown waves I once used to defend myself against the piercing judgment of the Upper East Siders, a match to their extensively botoxed faces and expensive, lithe figures. 

Thanks to Faye, it was difficult for people to see what I had survived. But when I looked in the mirror, the carnage of my mane was all I could see. Having nowhere to hide, I unwrapped the hairband I used to disguise my receding hairline. A thin nest of dried-out hair lay bare underneath. I slumped in Taylor’s chair and admitted the truthful cause of my hair loss. 

She sympathetically replied, “Why didn’t you tell me this the last time you were here?”

I confessed I was too embarrassed.

“I see,” she said. “What changed?”

Back in the room where the women come and go speaking of Michelangelo, I thought of Lazarus, Guido, and Dante in the eighth circle of hell. How do I explain to my hairdresser that I have been to hell and back?

Maybe it was the feeling of fingers once again on my head, but a vision of Faye in her hipster jeans and white sneakers came to mind. I thought of the tenderness she showed me. Her complete acceptance of me in my most vulnerable human state.

“I had a lot of help,” I said.

In Judaism, angels are messengers of worldly truths. They often appear in disguise. The only thing distinguishing them from human messengers is the content of the message they are there to illuminate. There is a story in the Book of Zechariah about Joshua standing before an angel in dirty clothes. The angel commands him to take off his clothing, giving him new clothes and, notably, a clean turban. The angel says, “See, I have taken your guilt away from you.” (Zechariah 3: 4-5).

I too needed someone to take away my shame. At that moment, I no longer cared what the women in the hair salon thought of me. I shed my disguise. What I once saw as human frailty, I now simply saw as me: a woman who had been through a lot and was tentatively rejoining the land of the living. A messenger was sent to teach me I needn’t be embarrassed by the messiness of survival. And it didn’t make me weak to expose my vulnerability to the world. It made me human. 

Message received, Faye. 

-Jenny Leon

Jenny Leon is a corporate lawyer who was shocked to find that she was not spiritually fulfilled by her day job. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two toddlers. Her work has been featured in the Globe and Mail, HuffPost Canada, and Motherwell. For more of her work, see here: https://linktr.ee/jennyrosenyc.