And no, it’s not ACTUALLY a song lyric, but all day it’s been stuck in my head that way.

• Can’t live, can’t breathe with no Hair
• It’s how I feel whenever  you ain’t there
• There’s no Hair, no Hair

Yeah, melodramatic, but between the major hair loss and the sidekick trying to kill a cold that I’m also fighting… it’s what I’ve got stuck in my head.

Wig shopping was not horrible, but also not a success.

I find wigs hot, itchy, and expensive, and not easy to make flattering.  I did buy a few online… we’ll see what they are like when they come in.  I also got a couple of scarves, a couple of hats, and ordered a few chemo beanie thingies online too. Posted more of each on my Pinterest board for head coverings… feel free to comment there.

Other than that, saw my chemo doc today, he says I’m doing great and he’s a happy guy.  Got a fill, so now the water balloons are at 480 cc. I actually look down and see something that looks like boobies to me.  Small, deformed, nippleless boobies, but when I’m wearing clothes, it’s still better than it was this AM.

But the big fill means typing is tough… so I’ll have to add in that I’ve got an awareness thingy planned for this Friday… it’s the ONLY chemo I’m having during breast cancer awareness month, so seems like a good day to make my little move.

I’ll share more deets once my pecs aren’t so sore & I can tell you more. 🙂

Likely something that’s TMI, but it’s 3:30a, I’ve had one hour of sleep, and I thought that maybe again getting my chaotic thoughts would clear my head enough to let me sleep… but I’m a picker. Like if there’s a scab that looks like it might come off, I pick it off.  If I have a blemish, I can’t just leave it alone.  Sunburn is peeling? I get all of that nasty dead skin off right away.

So it’s no surprise to me that when my hair is coming out any time I pull on it, I can’t leave it alone.

There is SOME logic to this, and although I’ve been showing it as a parlor trick since Thursday AM, it’s only in the privacy of my own home that I’m pulling out handfuls of hair to make a little pile on the floor. Which I then vacuum up, or roll into a ball and toss in the garbage, or both.   But if I pull out the hair, it’s not on my shirt or the couch or somewhere else.

If I put it in a pile on the floor it’s not elsewhere on the floor.  Because if it’s elsewhere on the floor it ends up clinging to my socks.  I had on white ones today, and I realized this afternoon it looked like we had a shedding Chocolate Lab with all of the hair on my socks.

So of course, I took off the socks. Problem solved.

Friends have asked, and no, it doesn’t hurt when the hair comes out.  Not any more than it does when your hair comes out on a normal day… if I just let it happen, I might not even notice.  But like I said, I’m a picker, which says two things. First, there is a physical sensation on my scalp. It’s like when you wear a hat all day, or leave hair in a ponytail too long.  That “hair hurt” as my husband calls it, feeling.  So I want to rub at it… and when I “pick at it” the hair comes out.

But even bigger, I want control.  I decide when these hairs are going to shed if I can and I’m going to control the disposal.  Damnit.

So Saturday, after my son’s football game, I’ve got an appointment at the SCCA’s Shine store to pick out some head coverings.  I’m figuring at least one wig and another non-tie scarfy thing, since I’m stressed about tying one in a way that will make it stay. Maybe they can help with that too.

I’ve also started a new Pinterest board, “Wigging Out” with really random and crazy wigs or hats I COULD buy. I kind of like the rainbow bob… talk about a pop of color!  Feel free to comment on if I could pull these things off in public.

So other than sharing the exciting news that I am going to find new hair tomorrow… I want to make sure everyone knows I really am OK.

I’m not really EXCITED about going bald, but I’m completely accepting it, and I WILL move forward.

This week brings another fill and meeting with my chemo doc on Monday, and then round two.

But don’t you see what that means?

By this time, one week from now, I’ll be past the half-way point in my chemo.  Over the hump. On the downhill side.

Physically, I’m now off all of the meds that I was taking for my surgery, although I’m keeping them around for the TE fills and chemo, since they do help.

It was three months ago Friday that I found the effing lump, and I’ve already come so far.

I’m kicking its ASS!  Don’t be worried about this ninja, CELEBRATE.

Oh, and check your boobies. Just in case. 🙂

So with the wallowing, it’s been easy to forget that I have some of the best friends on the face of the planet. Seriously.

First of all, there is the part where I’m lucky to be in love with my best friend. The sidekick has a cold right now, but he’s the best friend a ninja could ever hope to have. He actually has made it easier when live gets hard. And he holds me when I cry. And sometimes, that’s what I really need.

But this post is dedicated to the awesomeness of my friends. If your friends is true they’ll be there with you, through the thick and thin.

And although TLC may be without their L… I am not without my friends!

This week alone, I got a hat in the mail that was not only knitted by a Jeopardy! champion,  but says “Breast Cancer Ninja”

Best. Breast Cancer Ninja hat. EVER! (Says “BREAST CANCER” on other side)

And then that same day, when I asked friends about lipstick to make myself feel better, another friend, who lost her mom to cancer in the last couple of years and gained a brother/son who is about the age of my son gave me a gift of a Sephora gift card so that I can buy more lipstick to make me feel like a girl, even without the boobs and hair that I’m accustomed to seeing on myself.

I even have wonderful friends from college who are posting on my FB wall to let me know that they are thinking of me, even if we haven’t talked in person for 15+ years, or another friend whose sons play football with my 9-year-old and I just met after my diagnosis, but texts me almost every day to make sure I’m OK and the kid will get to practice or the next game on time.

At work, I have a whole TEAM of amazing colleagues who keep telling me that I do look like I have boobs, not just “spared tissue” as I think of them, or that my hair looks good, when I really, really hate it. They are the folks who gave me the boobloons, and the sign that I keep outside my bedroom so I see at least once a day:

You can’t read the writing, but it’s messages of encouragement and love from some of the most talented tech PR people on the planet. Seriously.

I work with people who could be focused on their job (they are kind of launching Windows 8 this month) but they make me feel loved. And I can never, ever make it clear to them all how much that means.

Today I even made a brand new friend, my Bright Pink, “Pink Pal,” another young mom who recently went through chemo, a bilateral mastectomy, and reconstruction. Even though I was yelling at her on my cell phone from the side of my son’s football practice field, it felt SO good to know I’m not alone. There are other young, healthy women who are dealing with the same shit.

As a matter of fact, my pal Tina was able to give me some great, and very timely advice. (Don’t use the tape lint roller on my head…)

See, today, my hair started falling out by the handful.

It started a tiny bit last night, but by the shower this AM, it felt like there was more hair than usual in the drain. And when I used a little bit of my “True Wax” (which smells AMAZEBALLS) in my hair, my hand came away covered in little strands. And if I pull on any little bit to style it, or because it ITCHES, I come away with, well, a handful of hair.

I’ve cried about it approximately 5 times today. Would have been more, but after I put the little monkey to bed, I broke out the Costco brand Golden Margarita.

For the first time ever, I’m officially blogging buzzed, and I don’t think the sidekick is going to appreciate how much margarita is missing when he wakes up from his NyQuil induced slumber on Friday AM.

Then again, since I was crying while working when he came home tonight, he will probably forgive me.

Did I mention that I’m lucky I’m in love with my best friend? For 20 years, and counting.

I know I’ve said it before, but I’m one lucky-ass ninja. Even WITH the breast cancer part.

Yeah- drunk blogging. But I REALLY do love you guys!

And isn’t this better than if I started drunk dialing?  🙂

Every year at Halloween, the sidekick takes our kid out to trick or treat, and I stay to pass out candy.  This works well, sometimes the sidekick even dresses up, and I like to plop on a witch hat or something, just to make it fun for the kids at the door.

This year I was considering being an Amazon… since they supposedly chopped off a breast to be better archers, and that seems pretty fierce, and my son thought I was going to be a Ninja like him… but I told him this morning, I’m already a ninja.

So I bought this shirt, and I’ll get a tiara, and since I won’t have hair, maybe a pink sassy wig…

Ninjas Rescue Princesses… even when they are the princess too.

Here’s the deal.  I’ve had a lot of people tell me I’m still beautiful and it comes from the inside, etcetera, etcetera, yadda, yadda, blah, blah, blah.

But I was listing to my favorite Spotify list for when I’m feeling pissy , “Not to be effed with,” and Beautiful by Christina Aguilera came on and it occurred to me, if “your words won’t bring me down,” they really won’t bring me up either.

I have to get my OWN shit together. As we tell my son often, no one else can control how you react to things. I have to own my own reaction.

So yeah, I’ve gotten a little wallowy.

But in the words of today’s “poet” Katy Perry,  in her eff you break up song, Part of Me, “throw your bombs and your blows, but you’re not gonna break my soul!”

Fuck you cancer.

I will undoubtedly have more shitty days. And I didn’t have the best physical self image before this started, so I may still be fighting that bugaboo for months and likely years to come (38 years of habit are hard to break) but despite my wonderful friends and family, none of them can fight the cancer or self-image, or anything else for me.

This princess is going to have to put on her big girl panties and rescue herself!

Slightly sad song, but when it’s been 20 years since I’ve had bangs, and  25 years since clippers visited my head, being in a pixie cut has brought on a little case of the blues.

I may have, in fact, bawled my eyes out when I got home after cutting off all of my hair.

Holy shit, I did it!

This cancer thing has changed my life.  What I can’t decide is HOW it has changed my life.  I have a hard time focusing on the things that I want to, or need to when it just doesn’t seem IMPORTANT.

I don’t want to be one of those people who are all about this thing that has happened to them, which is part of the logic behind cutting my hair this weekend.  Cancer didn’t happen to my hair. I happened to my hair. Although as the sidekick mentioned, if this pixie haircut doesn’t fall out, I’m going to be PISSED that I cut off all of my hair for no good reason.  I don’t care who thinks it’s cute.  Between that and the boobs, it’s hard for me to feel like a girl.

So I’ve been buying things like pink stretchy bras, but I think what I really need to go find is some new lipstick. Perhaps that I’ll go find that soon.

And so it goes, and so it goes. And you’re the only one who knows.

And I by that I mean the hair stops growing, because as long as there is hair… I will shave.

I was also told today that I’m not supposed to be shaving under my arms with a razor since the nerves there are damaged from surgery (aka, I have NO feeling) so I guess I’m going to need a wet/dry electric thingy. Because I don’t not shave under my arms in the shower. Ever. Like, the times I was only allowed to lift my arms 45 degrees, in the shower was the one moment I totally violated it. Because it’s a big part of how I feel clean.

I’ve been having a pretty hard time emotionally this week. I think it starts with the fact that this has been the physically hardest week, but it also extends into how useful I feel in general.

I haven’t talked about my symptoms a ton because I don’t like to whine, and I don’t want anyone to worry, but I also promised when I became the Breast Cancer Ninja that I would be real. So I’m going whine really quick, and then I want to ask for some opinions.  Feel free to skip the bullets, which are the whiney part:

1. Mouth sores suck. It feels like the bottom of my feet when I’ve spent 12 hours in a chlorine pool, except for all inside my mouth, and it has all week.
2. No more TP? I called to ask about my bottom being sore, and they said, “We suggest that you don’t use toilet paper.” So now I have those clammy wipe things that are flushable, but you’d think that this should have been in the “chemo teach” last week.
3. WTF with the shaving thing? You’d think this is something they’d say early on, like they did with the never-get-BP-or-blood-draw-from-left-arm.
4. It only ever seems like I get partial info from the nurses. They told me to call and they’d give me prescriptions when I was @ chemo last week, then asked me if I’d done a bunch of OTC stuff before they write prescriptions. Uh, no, I have not been going rogue, trying random shit. I’ve already got a small pharmacy in my kitchen, so I’m not going to just TRY stuff when I don’t know how it interacts with the other stuff. I want to make this all EASIER on me, not harder by doing the wrong thing.
5. I’m having a hard time caring about work. I feel like I’m being left out of the loop, which drives me INSANE, and that I have no value since they’ve got someone in helping out while I’m “out.” But I don’t want to be out. And since I don’t know what it is that I’m being left out of, I don’t feel comfortable jumping in. So then I just get depressed and don’t do. Which does NO ONE any good. So then I get down on myself for that. I plan to fix this on Monday.

OK, so here’s the cheese to go with my whine.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this hair thing. You know, the part where it’s all going to fall out.

And the one thing I know is that I’m going to donate what I have, not sure where, but I still need to decide what I want to do with my head for the next couple of weeks.  Here’s a pic of how my hair looks now:

Self Portrait of a Ninja, No Makeup, Little Sleep

As you can see, my hair is a couple of inches past shoulder length.  Shedding hair that length is both wasteful if I’m going to donate, and gross as it shows up around the house.  So now the question becomes- what next?  I’ve uploaded several visual aids to a new Pinterest board “Pre-Bald” but the basic options are:

1. The 2012 version of the Pixie cut- a la Ginnifer Goodwin
2. The old school Pixie– Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina
3. The boy cut– I’ve shown it on Natalie Portman since I didn’t want to put a pic of my son on Pinterest 🙂
4. Bald- Like Britney when she lost her shit

If you’ve got another option, I’m open- I’ve even thought about short, then a funky pink or something, but I think the texture would make me cry and the color would ruin my towels.  I’ll just buy a sassy pink wig & call that urge fulfilled.

Today was another fill day, and again, I was able to take 120 cc of water in the good ol’ balloons, so NOW I’m at 360 cc.

Evidently when you have a lot of skin to spare from a “skin sparing mastectomy” the “fill ‘er up!” part goes a lot quicker.  I won’t be able to type for long, as my pecks have just noticed this invasion as I’ve started to share it with you and are now protesting up into my shoulder, but in all, I feel pretty good.

Here are the two bits of news from today:

1. My dream of getting this all done by the end of  the year is dead.  I will not be getting new boobs for my 39th birthday (Dec 28 for those of you who want to then shop for something ELSE for me… :)) but there’s a good chance they will be a gift to the sidekick for his birthday in March, and if not, for our 16th wedding anniversary in June, the will not only be in, but likely able to be wrapped in pretty bras.
2. With this fill, my front is finally starting to look like it belongs to a girl again.  People have been telling me that if you forget about my former cartoon chest, I just look like a small busted woman. Since I don’t remember ever looking like that, it’s a major relief to start to see something that resembles a breast when I look down again. With clothes on, I almost feel like a real girl.

Tomorrow that part where I feel OK may change, as I will go meet my new physical therapist. Gulp.

But the GOOD part about that next step?

I’ll get to figure out how much I can do to start working on the six-pack I need to go along with the new smaller boobs!

I started doing a little looking to the whole wig thing, and first surprise, my insurance doesn’t have any wig allowance.  I know of places to get free ones and all, but since I have pretty good insurance, I just thought that I’d use my insurance to get a wig, and save the free stuff for people who NEED the assistance. Sigh.

The thing I originally thought that I would do is have a wig made of my own hair, so that I would just have it.  I have gotten complements on my hair kind of forever, at different times and other than the ill-fated Ogilvie home perm that was immortalized in my 6th grade school picture. I don’t know that it’s anything SPECIAL, but although my hair is fine, there’s a lot of it, kind of like tons and tons of baby hair. And it’s pretty healthy. It’s just part of who I am.

The “wig of your own hair” option?  $1600.

So, yeah, not doing that!

I actually had a really nice conversation with the guy at the wig place, and he made me feel pretty good about the process and maybe not needing his wigs. He said that the reason a lot of women do their wigs is because they have very unique hair or head shapes, or they are trying to keep their cancer status to themselves.

My hair is a long bob, not really anything UNIQUE, just mine. And I don’t think my head is oddly shaped, and in case you hadn’t noticed with this whole blog thing, I’m not exactly being shy, so I’m thinking at this time that I should learn to knit hats… since I can knit, but all I’ve ever learned to do is a scarf, and rock some sassy wigs.

Which all sounds well and good, but it feels like I’ve already given up a lot.

When you’ve had D+ boobs since 8th grade, at least for me, they become a major part of your identity.

Gone.

When I was in 7th grade, someone accidentally called me a boy, and my hair hasn’t been shorter than chin length since.

Until now.

(Am I the only one noticing a pattern here? Actually, if I could get my 1988 waistline & butt we just might be in BUSINESS Here!)

I may be physically feeling better today, but the news makes it easier to stayed holed up at home in hiding. I feel like I’m losing my physical identity piece by piece. And by January, I don’t even know who that person will be in the mirror any more.

I guess next up will be to get info on how to draw in eyebrows and use fake lashes, which I’ve never had to do before… since with the dark brown hair, I’ve had brows & lashes to match… and since those are likely to go too.

So far, I’ve been able to take most of this in stride, but if chemo takes this Brown-Eyed Girl, and makes my brown eyes blue, I’m going to be seriously, SERIOUSLY pissed!

Last week I mentioned that it had been 20 years since I gave the sidekick my phone number in what turns out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, sober or not.

Twenty years ago tonight, we went to Boston Common for our most important first date ever.

Today has been tough, my hardest day yet of this cancer crap.

My legs, hips, and knees hurt unless I’m on oxy. The rest of me feels odd. I’ve been fighting nausea, and slept much of the day.

But as I’ve mentioned, I’ve got plans for the rest of my life that don’t involve cancer.

And if David can put up with me for another 20 years, and maybe even another 30 more, it’s only fair that I fight on, even on the days that suck.

I wouldn’t have made it through the last 20 years or any if this crap with out him.

If I’m lucky I never will.

OK, I’m not sure that GROOVY is the work I want, but I definitely feel odd, funky, and not quite right, but not HORRIBLE.

I have been taking my anti-nausea meds, although the issue seems to be more with the other end (I know, NICE) but I haven’t lost my lunch yet at all. I’m also not hungry… but once I start to eat it’s like I’m ravenous.  My body needs the calories, but my mind is in no way interested in food.

I’ve also got some odd joint pain, knees, hips, spine, and not a joint, but my teeth feel strange.  Again, not HORRIBLE, but odd.

I did manage to get out while my boys were shuttling mom home to Oly and get my last Pedi until chemo is done… so I have sparkly hot pink toes for the forseeable future.  They didn’t have my usual “I’m Not Really a Waitress,” so I figured I’d go cliché.

I do feel a little bit like a cliché all in pink all of the time, but since shiny red and pink have been my favorite colors, and I’ve been told the most flattering on me, I just own a lot of pink. It has nothing to do with the cancer that has been in my boobies, I promise.

The other thing that happened today was in talking to the woman next to me at the nail salon about how she’d recently lost a friend to BC.  She was a 5 year survivor, but then it came back, and in two years she was gone.

Sometimes I feel like I’m over doing it with this chemo crap when all of the bad was cut out.  But if my Doc thinks I need it, I’m not going to argue.  I know I felt better before I started the treatment than I do today… but if I want to feel like that ever again, I still have to fight.

And if I want to dance at my 9 year old’s wedding, I’m going to need to stick around for at LEAST a good 15 years.  And to dance at a grandkid’s wedding… I’ll need another 30, right?  So we fight today for more and more tomorrow.

With hot pink toes inside kick ass boots. 🙂