How to Keep From Pulling Your Hair Out

I actually thought I was going to be spared the whole hair-loss thing when, after two weeks of my first chemo treatment, my full, thick head of jet-black hair (with a sprinkling of gray) was intact. Even when I found hair in hats, shower drains, and bed sheets, the loss seemed modest.

Then I began pulling it out.

I have discussed this with my father and he said, "I just can’t figure it out. If I knew I was going to lose my hair, why would I want to pull it out?"

But my hair had become brittle, the consistency of straw, and I felt a strong urge to pull. Why? Just because.

More deeply, I pulled it out because I could, because there was a kind of morbid entertainment value in yanking it out in what was a generally joyless situation.

By the time you get to the point where your hair is falling out, you’ve already gone through a lot of treatment. Assuming early detection, you’ve had months of medication, treatment and time off from work (in my case, six months). You’ve spent a lot of time in the hospital or home alone, thinking about your condition and treatment. Enter the morbid fascination.

I mean, it’s not something that happens every day—being able to pull
out handfuls of hair. It’s kind of fascinating and makes a hell of a
party trick. Plus, there’s a sick science experiment aspect to it. Each
day your roots become weaker and the amount of tug required to yank it
loose is reduced.

It was also something to show my friends, family and curious strangers who watch my weekly YouTube cancer video blogs.
I wanted everyone to see the reality of the side effects of treatment.
Maybe, nobly, I partly wanted to pull my own hair out so that maybe
other people wouldn’t pull out theirs: If some idiot on YouTube could
satisfy someone else’s morbid fascination, well, good.

The problem with random pulling is that it leaves bald spots. Better
to just shave it all off, which I eventually did. That way it has a
better chance of growing back evenly.

It was probably a good thing that I largely refrained from pulling
at my eyebrows, and only once did I tug on my eyelashes. The brow hair
came out pretty easily; the lashes fell out of one eye on their own. In
the end, my brows stayed largely intact and despite a some lash loss, I
more or less looked like a guy who shaved his head on purpose. We live
in a time of fashionable head shaving, so it hardly drew any glances.

These days, the hair on my head is like three-day beard stubble,
with a few bald patches from my party tricks. My facial hair is coming
back with a vengeance. I lost probably 50 percent of my body hair, and
I can see a little stubble on my chest further south. I can feel each
rejuvenated follicle too, because it itches like hell. And any part of
my body that gets rubbed by clothing is soft, shiny and hairless as a
stripper’s booty.